Something that has been doing the rounds of mailing lists recently... -- acb
Ladies and gentlemen of the class of 2000, wear kevlar.
If I could offer you only one tip for the future, kevlar would be it. The bullet-stopping power of kevlar has been proven by scientists, whereas the rest of my advice has no basis more reliable than the ramblings of a hack Washington Post journalist with no idea what 'gothic' really means.
I will dispense this advice now, whether you like it or not.
Enjoy the power and beauty of your youth - oh, never mind, you will not understand the power and beauty of your youth until they have been taken from you by that kid you stuffed in a gym locker because he had weird hair.
If you survive the ensuing onslaught, in 20 years you'll look back at video of yourself on TV and realize that it was probably the most exciting thing that will ever happen to you.
Even so, you are not as depressed as you imagine. Life gets much worse than this. So go rent 'Pump Up The Volume' and 'Heathers' and get over it.
Don't worry about the future; or worry, but know that worrying is as effective as trying to pin all of society's troubles on movies, video games, Marilyn Manson and trenchcoats. The real troubles in your life are apt to be things that never crossed your worried mind; the kind that blindside you at 11:21 am on some idle Tuesday.
Do not do things that scare you; society will take care of that for you.
Cry.
Don't be reckless with other people's lives. Don't put up with people who are reckless with yours. Just avoid them before they put you on their hit list.
Don't waste your time on jealousy. Sometimes you're ahead, sometimes you're behind...but there's always plenty of time for that oddball kid who only wears black to catch up to you, and overtake you. Just worry about yourself. P? Remember the insults you receive, and forget the compliments. Nobody really cares about your accomplishments, only their own, so the compliments are usually just empty chatter, more meaningless than birds chirping at each other on the phone lines.
Keep your old books; they're never out of date. Throw away your old first-person shooters; they're obsolete 3 weeks after release.
Learn to use apostrophe's properly; and semicolon's, too.
Study hard, but don't feel guilty if you don't know what you want to do with your life... the most unsuspecting people you know in high school will probably become the heads of large software companies by the time you're 40. Whereas the jocks will probably never get further than semi-pro ball, in spite of their attitudes in high school.
Get plenty of exercise anyway.
Be kind to your knees. You'll appreciate them when you're down on them begging for your life.
Maybe you'll be injured, maybe you won't. Maybe you'll be killed, maybe you won't. Maybe you'll die in a hail of gunfire. Maybe you'll live to see your children risk their own lives by going to school. Whatever you do, don't congratulate yourself too much or berate yourself either. Your choices are half chance. So are everybody else's.
Enjoy your body. Use it every way you can. Don't be afraid of it, or what other people think of it. It's the greatest instrument you'll ever own. Unless you own a semiautomatic pistol. When it comes down to a contest between a scrawny kid with a gun, and a beefy high school linebacker named Biff, guess who's gonna win? So get a gun, if you can. You'll need it to defend yourself one day.
Practice shooting. Even if you have nowhere to do it but in your own back yard.
Learn how to use the safety, even if you don't have kids.
Do NOT read gun magazines. They will only turn you into Timothy McVeigh.
Ignore your parents. When you snap and take your own life, they'll say that they had no idea what was wrong with you. They didn't. Ditto with your siblings. They know nothing about the pain you go through every day. Nobody understands you but you. So screw 'em all.
Understand that cliques come and go, but there are plenty of good gangs out there where people like you can get together and play Magic: The Gathering every weekend. Work hard to conform to the gang standards - because the older you get, the more you need the people who bought you beer when you were young.
Live in New York city once, but leave before you get mugged. Live in Colorado once, but leave before you get killed.
Sigh.
Accept certain inalienable truths: jocks will hate you; teachers will misunderstand you; nobody likes a kid who dresses in black. And when you do, you'll fantasize that in your time, people liked you, your friends respected you, and your president didn't decry school violence while he simultaneously ordered missile strikes on the women and children of a small European country.
Don't expect anyone else to care about you. Maybe you have a close friend, maybe you even have a girlfriend, but you never know when either of them will turn their back on you. It happens a lot. Get used to it.
Go ahead and mess with your hair; who cares if it looks 85 by the time you're 40? The way things are going, you'll be lucky to live to see 40 anyway. Buy a black trenchcoat while you're at it. Wear makeup. Pierce your tongue. Whatever. It's your body.
Be careful whose music you buy, but be patient with those who supply decent goth music, because there's just not that much good goth music out there.
Violence is a form of expression. Dispensing it is a way of leaving your mark on the world, stomping it into the ground, painting in ugly colors your rage and hatred towards the world. Yet despite all this, realize that by performing an act of violence, you will barely leave a smudge on the world. You are merely a media spectacle, and in 6 months, you will be utterly forgotten. So in the long run, you'll be much better off just reading a few books and trying to accomplish something with your life.
Another thing about Goths: they're somewhere between the jocks and the nerds/weirdos, because they tend to form conformistic, exclusionary cliques. They're not as powerful and brazen as the jocks (they're a minority who wear weird clothes, after all), and they're generally too subtle to use brute violence, but the hard-core Goths are just as contemptuous of nonconformists and outsiders as the jocks and preppies.
Having said that, the environment on the periphery of the Goth thing tends to be more tolerant of weirdness and individuality. I know a great many individuals who do not label themselves as Goths, and often have quite a low opinion of the card-carrying Goths, yet share some attributes of this subculture (some musical preferences, tendency to wear black, &c.) whilst rejecting others.
No need for a conscious conspiracy; like most Conspiracies, this is simple emergent behaviour, the result of basic human nature.
Mob psychology differs a lot from individual psychology. The anonymous mob and its bestial camaraderie amplifies those base impulses which are suppressed in the civilised individual. An individual jock or preppie may not have much feeling one way or another with respect to a geek or outsider, but put a mob and social hierarchy behind him and he becomes part of an inhuman machine.
I read a news report somewhere which interview a former Trenchcoat Mafia member, and debunked the whole neo-Nazi thing. Supposedly, their point was that they believed the jocks were behaving like Nazis; they also wore anti-Nazi insignia (patches with swastikas struck through). Of course, this doesn't make quite as good press as saying they were Nazis.
This is often tenuous. I remember when I was in high school (a public school, albeit with an entrance exam), the teachers vetted the student newspaper, and killed controversial articles.
School is a spartan, authoritarian institution, and that is intrinsic in its nature.
I've heard of other smart people with smart kids who, not trusting their kids to the Spartan, conformistic machine of the school system, went the way of homeschooling. They kept their kids out of school, teaching them themselves. In many cases, the kids were several years ahead of their conventionally schooled peers.
If you're in America, you're allowed to do this. Here in Australia, school education up until the age of 16 is compulsory.
Far from being idyllic, happy communities, high schools (including the one in question) are hellish social pressure cookers. High school society is strictly regimented into rigid hierarchies; at the top there are the athletes, the cheerleaders and the kids with rich parents; the alpha primates. At the very bottom of the food chain are those who do not fit in. The environment is a closed system; there is only one hierarchy, and nowhere to run. And failure to conform is relentlessly punished, not by the indifferent authorities but by the system itself. Systematic physical bullying goes on on a scale sometimes reminiscent of the English public school tradition of "fagging". The whole system is sadistically elegant; if a latter-day Dante was writing an updated Inferno, he could scarcely find a better model than the social structures of the high school.
This system evolved to serve a purpose; by ruthlessly punishing difference, rewarding conformity and reinforcing an immutable status quo, it creates the preconditions of a modern industrial society; a population of predictable, conditioned worker/consumer drones, people who accept their place in the great machine of society and don't make trouble. The relatively small number of murders and suicides is well within the margin of acceptable loss.
Meanwhile, when the jocks and popular kids grow up, they take their places in the leader-caste of society; and while most of them are, by then, relatively decent individuals, they do not see that there is a problem. Hence, when a bunch of black-clad angstpuppies massacre some jocks and popular kids, the solution is obvious: sue the video-game companies, restrict the Internet. and ban aspects of outsider subcultures, such as black clothing.
And so, the invisible hand increases the pressure even further.
Get a trenchcoat. The pockets are very useful for sneaking in cans of Coke, and thus not having to rely on the overpriced, watered-down stuff sold at the cinema.
The Earth is a public resource, belonging to all of humanity. Land is not owned, but licensed, very similar to the way an airwave frequency is licensed by the FCC.
The airwaves and the land belogn to everyone, and those who abuse it should lose their license to use that frequency/plot.
Interesting concept, but a little out of touch with reality.
But still it wouldn't power up instantly. Linux would still take maybe 10 seconds to boot.
Then again, even with DOS there's the BIOS self-test time, which is unacceptable for a shelf hi-fi component. For such a device to be anything other than a geek curio, you'd have to replace the BIOS, possibly ROMming Linux or some similar OS.
Australia has never had a bill of rights, and has had British-style obscenity laws, though we've generally been too laid-back to do much with them. Until a rabid God-botherer got the balance of power in the Senate, and is using his power for evil (Saudi-style Internet regulation, more TV/film censorship, &c).
As for Canada, they're a bit uptight and they've got some loopy Marxist-feminist ideals in places. I recall reading about some Canadian who was convicted and fined for defamation against the concept of women and children. That would be equivalent to an American being fined for saying bad things about motherhood and apple pie.
Don't know about the current state of free speech in Britain, except that public performance of some types of electronic dance music is illegal under the Criminal Justice Act, a law passed specifically to demonise ravers. Things may be more liberal now that the Tories have been out of government for some time though.
AFAIK, TOS is a version of CP/M 68k (the 68000 port of CP/M), licensed from DRI and rebadged to exalt then Atari CEO Jack Tramiel's ego. Therefore large chunks of it would belong to Caldera.
Mind you, Caldera aren't as liberal with CP/M and variants as they are with GEM, as CP/M still may have market value (as a low-end embedded micro-OS).
I think most DAT drives can't do this. Some company sells a special DAT drive which can suck audio off DATs as well as reading/writing data; it comes with Macintosh software and is marketed at audio professionals.
Of course, I could be wrong.
As for ADAT, isn't that an entirely different format, storing multitrack audio on expensive VHS tapes?
I agree with you. The idea of a hi-fi component which takes a minute to boot (and several if it hasn't been shut down properly) seems rather inelegant and cumbersome; the fact that you can have it hosting log-ins and cracking RSA in the background doesn't quite make up for that.
A DOS-alike could be useful; Isn't DR-DOS semi-freely available? Also, there may be a free implementation of DOS out there. Or possibly, if one was to go commercial, one could licence a RTOS, like OS/9 or QNX.
Alternately, it may be possible to cut Linux down into a lighter OS. Possibly a Linux kernel minus unneeded drivers, modified to boot from the Flash BIOS space of a motherboard, and leaving out all but necessary processes. If you eliminate read-write filesystems, you can bypass the fsck problem as well.
Last I heard, desktop computer CD-ROM drives were not designed to handle the vibrations experienced in a moving vehicle. It'd be interesting to know how well the one on this device works in motion, and how long it lasts.
Trading of domains which have been paid for should be allowed; there is no reason to impose such a draconian ban on exchange of possessions. And if some idiot with too much money wants to blow a couple hundred thousand of their own cash on tooc00l4u.net or something, that's their business.
As for squatting, that's a different matter altogether; it's more akin to fraud than anything else.
theforcewillbewithu2.com for $100,000? For some reason my reaction is one of amusement, albeit of the sort usually elicited by Darwin Awards.
As for banning it, I'm afraid that no law will ever prevent fools from parting with their money, and helpful third parties from assisting them in fulfilling this desire.
Actually, Apple did port MacOS to PC hardware around 1990. Back then MacOS was a bit simpler than System 7 (the one which was ported to PPC, with an emulation step). Apple's engineers managed to port it to Intel hardware, and created a demo (which may have even been shown outside of Apple). Jobs, in his infinite wisdom, ordered it scrapped. Shortly afterwards, Microsoft brought out Windows 3.0, and the rest, as they say. is history.
Prerequisites for Legitimising Spam
on
ISP Sues Spammer
·
· Score: 2
If spam is legalised in its current form in any way, it will still be the redistribution of network bandwidth and disk space to parasitic advertisers. And being legitimate, it will escalate and become even more of a blight on the Net.
The only way that spam could be legitimised was if the advertiser paid for it. If it was conducted over a protocol other than SMTP (as it currently is), where each message was accompanied by payment (or by an account number and credit limit; the server would send it only to as many networks as the credit amount would cover). Receiving servers would be reimbursed for resources used, and advertisers would be billed. Also, fraudulent advertisers could lose their accounts. This could then translate to an alternative to banner ads for free POP/IMAP accounts; users get a metered amount of legit-spam in return for the free account.
Other than something like this, spam is theft of services, plain and simple.
Slashdot Mirror
-- acb
Ladies and gentlemen of the class of 2000, wear kevlar.
If I could offer you only one tip for the future, kevlar would be it. The bullet-stopping power of kevlar has been proven by scientists, whereas the rest of my advice has no basis more reliable than the ramblings of a hack Washington Post journalist with no idea what 'gothic' really means.
I will dispense this advice now, whether you like it or not.
Enjoy the power and beauty of your youth - oh, never mind, you will not understand the power and beauty of your youth until they have been taken from you by that kid you stuffed in a gym locker because he had weird hair.
If you survive the ensuing onslaught, in 20 years you'll look back at video of yourself on TV and realize that it was probably the most exciting thing that will ever happen to you.
Even so, you are not as depressed as you imagine. Life gets much worse than this. So go rent 'Pump Up The Volume' and 'Heathers' and get over it.
Don't worry about the future; or worry, but know that worrying is as effective as trying to pin all of society's troubles on movies, video games, Marilyn Manson and trenchcoats. The real troubles in your life are apt to be things that never crossed your worried mind; the kind that blindside you at 11:21 am on some idle Tuesday.
Do not do things that scare you; society will take care of that for you.
Cry.
Don't be reckless with other people's lives. Don't put up with people who are reckless with yours. Just avoid them before they put you on their hit list.
Don't waste your time on jealousy. Sometimes you're ahead, sometimes you're behind...but there's always plenty of time for that oddball kid who only wears black to catch up to you, and overtake you. Just worry about yourself. P? Remember the insults you receive, and forget the compliments. Nobody really cares about your accomplishments, only their own, so the compliments are usually just empty chatter, more meaningless than birds chirping at each other on the phone lines.
Keep your old books; they're never out of date. Throw away your old first-person shooters; they're obsolete 3 weeks after release.
Learn to use apostrophe's properly; and semicolon's, too.
Study hard, but don't feel guilty if you don't know what you want to do with your life... the most unsuspecting people you know in high school will probably become the heads of large software companies by the time you're 40. Whereas the jocks will probably never get further than semi-pro ball, in spite of their attitudes in high school.
Get plenty of exercise anyway.
Be kind to your knees. You'll appreciate them when you're down on them begging for your life.
Maybe you'll be injured, maybe you won't. Maybe you'll be killed, maybe you won't. Maybe you'll die in a hail of gunfire. Maybe you'll live to see your children risk their own lives by going to school. Whatever you do, don't congratulate yourself too much or berate yourself either. Your choices are half chance. So are everybody else's.
Enjoy your body. Use it every way you can. Don't be afraid of it, or what other people think of it. It's the greatest instrument you'll ever own. Unless you own a semiautomatic pistol. When it comes down to a contest between a scrawny kid with a gun, and a beefy high school linebacker named Biff, guess who's gonna win? So get a gun, if you can. You'll need it to defend yourself one day.
Practice shooting. Even if you have nowhere to do it but in your own back yard.
Learn how to use the safety, even if you don't have kids.
Do NOT read gun magazines. They will only turn you into Timothy McVeigh.
Ignore your parents. When you snap and take your own life, they'll say that they had no idea what was wrong with you. They didn't. Ditto with your siblings. They know nothing about the pain you go through every day. Nobody understands you but you. So screw 'em all.
Understand that cliques come and go, but there are plenty of good gangs out there where people like you can get together and play Magic: The Gathering every weekend. Work hard to conform to the gang standards - because the older you get, the more you need the people who bought you beer when you were young.
Live in New York city once, but leave before you get mugged. Live in Colorado once, but leave before you get killed.
Sigh.
Accept certain inalienable truths: jocks will hate you; teachers will misunderstand you; nobody likes a kid who dresses in black. And when you do, you'll fantasize that in your time, people liked you, your friends respected you, and your president didn't decry school violence while he simultaneously ordered missile strikes on the women and children of a small European country.
Don't expect anyone else to care about you. Maybe you have a close friend, maybe you even have a girlfriend, but you never know when either of them will turn their back on you. It happens a lot. Get used to it.
Go ahead and mess with your hair; who cares if it looks 85 by the time you're 40? The way things are going, you'll be lucky to live to see 40 anyway. Buy a black trenchcoat while you're at it. Wear makeup. Pierce your tongue. Whatever. It's your body.
Be careful whose music you buy, but be patient with those who supply decent goth music, because there's just not that much good goth music out there.
Violence is a form of expression. Dispensing it is a way of leaving your mark on the world, stomping it into the ground, painting in ugly colors your rage and hatred towards the world. Yet despite all this, realize that by performing an act of violence, you will barely leave a smudge on the world. You are merely a media spectacle, and in 6 months, you will be utterly forgotten. So in the long run, you'll be much better off just reading a few books and trying to accomplish something with your life.
But trust me on the kevlar.
Another thing about Goths: they're somewhere between the jocks and the nerds/weirdos, because they tend to form conformistic, exclusionary cliques. They're not as powerful and brazen as the jocks (they're a minority who wear weird clothes, after all), and they're generally too subtle to use brute violence, but the hard-core Goths are just as contemptuous of nonconformists and outsiders as the jocks and preppies.
Having said that, the environment on the periphery of the Goth thing tends to be more tolerant of weirdness and individuality. I know a great many individuals who do not label themselves as Goths, and often have quite a low opinion of the card-carrying Goths, yet share some attributes of this subculture (some musical preferences, tendency to wear black, &c.) whilst rejecting others.
No need for a conscious conspiracy; like most Conspiracies, this is simple emergent behaviour, the result of basic human nature.
Mob psychology differs a lot from individual psychology. The anonymous mob and its bestial camaraderie amplifies those base impulses which are suppressed in the civilised individual. An individual jock or preppie may not have much feeling one way or another with respect to a geek or outsider, but put a mob and social hierarchy behind him and he becomes part of an inhuman machine.
That, my friends, is the Conspiracy.
There's a copy currently on http://dev.null.org/acb/
When I have the time to code the rant index, it'll be archived for all time with its own URL.
-- acb
I read a news report somewhere which interview a former Trenchcoat Mafia member, and debunked the whole neo-Nazi thing. Supposedly, their point was that they believed the jocks were behaving like Nazis; they also wore anti-Nazi insignia (patches with swastikas struck through). Of course, this doesn't make quite as good press as saying they were Nazis.
This is often tenuous. I remember when I was in high school (a public school, albeit with an entrance exam), the teachers vetted the student newspaper, and killed controversial articles.
School is a spartan, authoritarian institution, and that is intrinsic in its nature.
I've heard of other smart people with smart kids who, not trusting their kids to the Spartan, conformistic machine of the school system, went the way of homeschooling. They kept their kids out of school, teaching them themselves. In many cases, the kids were several years ahead of their conventionally schooled peers.
If you're in America, you're allowed to do this. Here in Australia, school education up until the age of 16 is compulsory.
This system evolved to serve a purpose; by ruthlessly punishing difference, rewarding conformity and reinforcing an immutable status quo, it creates the preconditions of a modern industrial society; a population of predictable, conditioned worker/consumer drones, people who accept their place in the great machine of society and don't make trouble. The relatively small number of murders and suicides is well within the margin of acceptable loss.
Meanwhile, when the jocks and popular kids grow up, they take their places in the leader-caste of society; and while most of them are, by then, relatively decent individuals, they do not see that there is a problem. Hence, when a bunch of black-clad angstpuppies massacre some jocks and popular kids, the solution is obvious: sue the video-game companies, restrict the Internet. and ban aspects of outsider subcultures, such as black clothing.
And so, the invisible hand increases the pressure even further.
Looks rather like Spiro the Dragon, from the eponymous PlayStation game.
That being said, not bad. Add a bit more contrast and brighten up the lighting, though, to make it look lighter and more cartoonish.
Then I could have Quake twice before all of the Windows people. :)
...assuming that they make a Linux/PPC binary.
Unfortunately, such binaries tend to be a bit thin on the ground.
Get a trenchcoat. The pockets are very useful for sneaking in cans of Coke, and thus not having to rely on the overpriced, watered-down stuff sold at the cinema.
The Earth is a public resource, belonging to all of humanity. Land is not owned, but licensed, very similar to the way an airwave frequency is licensed by the FCC.
The airwaves and the land belogn to everyone, and those who abuse it should lose their license to use that frequency/plot.
Interesting concept, but a little out of touch with reality.
But still it wouldn't power up instantly. Linux would still take maybe 10 seconds to boot.
Then again, even with DOS there's the BIOS self-test time, which is unacceptable for a shelf hi-fi component. For such a device to be anything other than a geek curio, you'd have to replace the BIOS, possibly ROMming Linux or some similar OS.
Australia has never had a bill of rights, and has had British-style obscenity laws, though we've generally been too laid-back to do much with them. Until a rabid God-botherer got the balance of power in the Senate, and is using his power for evil (Saudi-style Internet regulation, more TV/film censorship, &c).
As for Canada, they're a bit uptight and they've got some loopy Marxist-feminist ideals in places. I recall reading about some Canadian who was convicted and fined for defamation against the concept of women and children. That would be equivalent to an American being fined for saying bad things about motherhood and apple pie.
Don't know about the current state of free speech in Britain, except that public performance of some types of electronic dance music is illegal under the Criminal Justice Act, a law passed specifically to demonise ravers. Things may be more liberal now that the Tories have been out of government for some time though.
AFAIK, TOS is a version of CP/M 68k (the 68000 port of CP/M), licensed from DRI and rebadged to exalt then Atari CEO Jack Tramiel's ego. Therefore large chunks of it would belong to Caldera.
Mind you, Caldera aren't as liberal with CP/M and variants as they are with GEM, as CP/M still may have market value (as a low-end embedded micro-OS).
I think most DAT drives can't do this. Some company sells a special DAT drive which can suck audio off DATs as well as reading/writing data; it comes with Macintosh software and is marketed at audio professionals.
Of course, I could be wrong.
As for ADAT, isn't that an entirely different format, storing multitrack audio on expensive VHS tapes?
I agree with you. The idea of a hi-fi component which takes a minute to boot (and several if it hasn't been shut down properly) seems rather inelegant and cumbersome; the fact that you can have it hosting log-ins and cracking RSA in the background doesn't quite make up for that.
A DOS-alike could be useful; Isn't DR-DOS semi-freely available? Also, there may be a free implementation of DOS out there. Or possibly, if one was to go commercial, one could licence a RTOS, like OS/9 or QNX.
Alternately, it may be possible to cut Linux down into a lighter OS. Possibly a Linux kernel minus unneeded drivers, modified to boot from the Flash BIOS space of a motherboard, and leaving out all but necessary processes. If you eliminate read-write filesystems, you can bypass the fsck problem as well.
Last I heard, desktop computer CD-ROM drives were not designed to handle the vibrations experienced in a moving vehicle. It'd be interesting to know how well the one on this device works in motion, and how long it lasts.
Trading of domains which have been paid for should be allowed; there is no reason to impose such a draconian ban on exchange of possessions. And if some idiot with too much money wants to blow a couple hundred thousand of their own cash on tooc00l4u.net or something, that's their business.
As for squatting, that's a different matter altogether; it's more akin to fraud than anything else.
theforcewillbewithu2.com for $100,000? For some reason my reaction is one of amusement, albeit of the sort usually elicited by Darwin Awards.
As for banning it, I'm afraid that no law will ever prevent fools from parting with their money, and helpful third parties from assisting them in fulfilling this desire.
Cool... having an Australian company (one in Melbourne, no less) could make domain payments a wee bit cheaper for me.
.org? If so, will it be possible to transfer an existing .org from Network Solutions to MelbourneIT?
Will these companies be handling
...and mentioning it on Slashdot will help? :-)
Sorry... late night, brain not working.
Actually, Apple did port MacOS to PC hardware around 1990. Back then MacOS was a bit simpler than System 7 (the one which was ported to PPC, with an emulation step). Apple's engineers managed to port it to Intel hardware, and created a demo (which may have even been shown outside of Apple). Jobs, in his infinite wisdom, ordered it scrapped. Shortly afterwards, Microsoft brought out Windows 3.0, and the rest, as they say. is history.
If spam is legalised in its current form in any way, it will still be the redistribution of network bandwidth and disk space to parasitic advertisers. And being legitimate, it will escalate and become even more of a blight on the Net.
The only way that spam could be legitimised was if the advertiser paid for it. If it was conducted over a protocol other than SMTP (as it currently is), where each message was accompanied by payment (or by an account number and credit limit; the server would send it only to as many networks as the credit amount would cover). Receiving servers would be reimbursed for resources used, and advertisers would be billed. Also, fraudulent advertisers could lose their accounts. This could then translate to an alternative to banner ads for free POP/IMAP accounts; users get a metered amount of legit-spam in return for the free account.
Other than something like this, spam is theft of services, plain and simple.