Glad to hear I'm not the only one. Over five years, and not a single spam at my alum account. Of course, like you I hear plenty of pleas for cash, but thankfully, so far I can just not read their stupid circulars if I'm in a bad mood.
Hey, I don't disagree with you totally, but the thing you need to remeber is that many of these schools are only giving out forwarding addresses, not full fledged mailboxes. It's a location wihtout the substance behind it.... No storage, no problems...
I don't mean to be overly offensive here, but you don't really get that much spam if you don't give your address away to porn sites.
I have three addresses. One of which I give only to friends (my alum address - and no, I haven't ever gotten spam from my school asking for money), one of which I give only to work contacts, and one that I give to porn/mailing lists/ecommerce sites and other spam magnets.
What i've found: I can post to forums, give friends my mail address, etc, wihtout getting a single spam at the addresses I care about. If I look at porn and give them a solid address though, I'm done for.
I therefore suggest that all you who have problems with spam lay off the porn, or at least segregate it. It'll do you some good.
While I agree with the base point you make in response to the hypothetical, I'm not so sure about one of the sub-points you made: I'm under the impression that it currently IS illegal to rip a DVD under the DMCA. Not that I think it should be, or that fair use shouldn't cover it, but hasn't the "backup copy" rule been rejected and moving content out of its original format been labeled as wrong by the courts?
Absolutely. Well, at least the courts have said so. Personally, I think the ruling was a piece of crap, but that's effectively what they shut down when they ruled against MP3.com's my.mp3 service. You know, the one where you used a CD that you bought to unlock those MP3s on their server and from then on out had access to them. The courts ruled that since the copies were made off of MP3.com's physical discs, that it was illegal for them to give you access to them, even if you could prove that you had paid for the physical CD yourself as well. Totally counterintuitive, but I believe it is now caselaw.
If you're not sure you want a single box, but just want a PC to control all your TV/Stereo/etc., there's a not so expensive but very cool solution available right now.
I have a couple of those Sony CD changers, and was looking for a way to organize/catalog all my discs... A few months ago I bought a "slink-e" from a company called nirvis that works like this:
There's a serial port on this little box that connects to your PC, and jacks out to the s-link ports on Sony products, in addition, there's an IR bus in the box so you can control anything that uses a remote. Some (currently windows only) software on the machine controls this box and has a published API if you want to write your own wrapper/GUI software to run things, you can. It comes with a free CD jukebox that can read all your discs from the player, catalog them in a local access DB, do CDDB/lyrics/cover art lookups, keyword/genre searches, etc...
I know that's not the most coherent message I've ever written, but the little gadget is one of the coolest toys I've ever owned. I can control my TV, TiVo, DVD, receiver, and two CD changers, all through a wireless mouse on my coffee table with the PC's video out going to my TV. It runs about $250, if I remember right, but the guys runnign the show are really cool, listen to suggestions on their message boards and modify their software to add user requested features...
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Glad to hear I'm not the only one. Over five years, and not a single spam at my alum account. Of course, like you I hear plenty of pleas for cash, but thankfully, so far I can just not read their stupid circulars if I'm in a bad mood.
Hey, I don't disagree with you totally, but the thing you need to remeber is that many of these schools are only giving out forwarding addresses, not full fledged mailboxes. It's a location wihtout the substance behind it.... No storage, no problems...
I have three addresses. One of which I give only to friends (my alum address - and no, I haven't ever gotten spam from my school asking for money), one of which I give only to work contacts, and one that I give to porn/mailing lists/ecommerce sites and other spam magnets.
What i've found: I can post to forums, give friends my mail address, etc, wihtout getting a single spam at the addresses I care about. If I look at porn and give them a solid address though, I'm done for.
I therefore suggest that all you who have problems with spam lay off the porn, or at least segregate it. It'll do you some good.
While I agree with the base point you make in response to the hypothetical, I'm not so sure about one of the sub-points you made: I'm under the impression that it currently IS illegal to rip a DVD under the DMCA. Not that I think it should be, or that fair use shouldn't cover it, but hasn't the "backup copy" rule been rejected and moving content out of its original format been labeled as wrong by the courts?
-A
If you're not sure you want a single box, but just want a PC to control all your TV/Stereo/etc., there's a not so expensive but very cool solution available right now.
I have a couple of those Sony CD changers, and was looking for a way to organize/catalog all my discs... A few months ago I bought a "slink-e" from a company called nirvis that works like this:
There's a serial port on this little box that connects to your PC, and jacks out to the s-link ports on Sony products, in addition, there's an IR bus in the box so you can control anything that uses a remote. Some (currently windows only) software on the machine controls this box and has a published API if you want to write your own wrapper/GUI software to run things, you can. It comes with a free CD jukebox that can read all your discs from the player, catalog them in a local access DB, do CDDB/lyrics/cover art lookups, keyword/genre searches, etc...
I know that's not the most coherent message I've ever written, but the little gadget is one of the coolest toys I've ever owned. I can control my TV, TiVo, DVD, receiver, and two CD changers, all through a wireless mouse on my coffee table with the PC's video out going to my TV. It runs about $250, if I remember right, but the guys runnign the show are really cool, listen to suggestions on their message boards and modify their software to add user requested features...
( end happy customer rant )