an aside: it's quite apparent that many slashdot users could really benefit from aquiring some business knowledge simply by the way marketing people are regarded by most people here.;)
Oh, I don't know, my experiences with marketing has left me with the feeling that Slashdotters regard Marketeers pretty accurately. While I realize that a good marketing team can be a real asset to a company, they are generally given far too much power over things in general. Marketing controls not only advertisements but also the look, feel, taste, and functionality of all the products, which means they spend a lot of time stepping on the toes of the engineers that design the things. I'm sure my bitterness comes from working on computer centric products where I have a good deal in common with the user base, and watching as marketing redesigns things in arbitrary ways for a user group they haven't taken the time to understand. I suspect this is true in most companies, marketing folks redesign cars, make suggestions on how the newest cola should taste, and generally muck around with things without any facts or figures or reasons as to why they're doing it.
I'll stop before this explodes into a full blown rant. I'll merely sum up by saying that due to the nature of their jobs, marketing folks will continue to be the thorn in the side of all engineers. I don't see this changing any time soon.
I also wonder what platform squaresoft is going to contract to next. will they stick with sony? renew their relationship with nintendo? join the evil empire (scary thought)?
As someone who buys consoles on the rule of thumb, "Which ever Square is supporting", I of course bought a PS2 in preperation of FFX. FFXI is also in development as a online only game, made specifically for the PS2. Beyond that, Square has indicated that they're planning on sticking with Sony for future projects and there really isn't any reason for them not to. The reason they bailed on Nintendo was due to Nintendo's reluctance to put a CDROM in their system, so long as Sony provides a viable platform Square has no reason to leave.
Now, if a competitive game system gets enough users, Square may decide it's worth while to hire another team of programmers and try their hand at cross platform development. Really the XBox has to prove itself several million times over before they can establish the clout a console maker needs.
Whether to use open or closed source solutions is closely linked to how IT is handled in the company. If you have a strong internal support staff and everything is generally done in house, open source provides a much nicer solution. If you only want to maintain a minimal internal staff and outsource all you can, commercial solutions are your only choice.
The problem I've run into with Microsoft and other closed technologies is that you're quite literally dealing with a black box. If you have a very good support staff who know what they're doing, very likely they'll want to do more customization than most commercial programs will allow. In my opinion, this is why open technologies are the way to go, an excellent IT group should tailor the environment to their users' needs as closely as possible. Closed systems are designed based on expectations of what a corporate environment needs, not on their actual needs.
Many companies will prefer to be sold their IT solution outright from another company, this way they don't have to maintain an internal IT staff that needs to know more than pick up the phone. If you go the other way though and build a top flight IT group that are expected to handle all problems internally, they'll end up requesting and using open solutions simply because of the flexibility they provide.
Fluorescents already run at 120 hz, they even mentioned that in the article. As great as a high refresh rate is on monitors, it's still the lesser of 2 evils. Once you start using a LCD display, you realize that any flicker, no matter how fast, is provides a visual/mental strain that will probably force every hospital to open a CS wing in 20 years. The moral is that any refresh is something us humans would prefer to avoid.
I guess you could say that the best alternatives are already here, incandescent and halogen already put out great light but aren't very efficient. I suspect fluorescents are as good as they're going to get, the replacement technology will probably be something completely different.
Re:America: the country without a past...
on
American Gods
·
· Score: 1
Immigration provides the US with a cyclical nature, one that is mostly unique to us. As people rise the socio-economic ladder here, there is a tendancy to have fewer children. The thing that offsets this population loss is immigration. Especially now, with the Baby Boomers set to retire and then die, recent immigrants are providing a necessary population base to keep this country moving smoothly. The key is that as generations pass, there is a continual rise up the economic ladder for people whose ancestors were immigrants.
The US really isn't a country in the traditional sense. Our country was founded as a union of states and only became a country out of necessity. Our popular culture is a eclectic mix of various previous cultures. The melting pot theory is commonly thought to be antiquated, in my mind there is still truth in that metaphor.
This same thought had occured to me a while back, I just assumed Square would do a special Japanese dub if only out of pride. Granted that the Japanese market is half the size of the US, and most people who are interested will probably see it regardless of which language it's in, but it just seems a slap in the face to the Japanese consumers to only do it in English. There is just as much brand loyalty in Japan as there is in the US and Square's fan base would have kept them afloat even if they never exported a game.
Of course, they would've done it by now if it was easy to do. The movie is modeled on the real actors, so the visuals and the voices aren't completely seperated. But still, it seems like there are enough tricks one could do with a little facial morphing and creative dubbing. And from the looks of the previews, the most expensive scenes to render don't seem to have a lot of focus on mouth movements.
Square continues to impress me with the exceptional quality of their games, but there is more they could do. While releasing Final Fantasy's in the states 6 months after their release in Japan is impressive, I still don't see why they can't do both versions simultaneously. In this modern world we live in, any company that can develop for multiple languages at the same time will certainly be several steps beyond their competitors.
Sorry, can't really think about any aspects of this case without focusing on how stupid these hackers were in the first place. I mean, geeze, if you want to become a criminal you've got to act like one all the time. This usually translates into keeping a low profile, a pretty common skill for most traditional criminals. Of course this may be the easiest way to catch computer criminals, appeal to their hubris by offering them a job for a lot of money.
I don't see a problem with ICANN
on
IETF vs. ICANN
·
· Score: 3
I really don't see what all the hubbub is about. Currently you can buy a domain name of your choosing for $35/yr, I can't think of anything else that gets you anywhere close to that kind of cost/benefit ratio. The money goes to maintain DNS servers that pretty much never go down, that level of reliability is critical for the Internet to function. I've had enough trouble just dealing with ISP DNS servers, a bunch of competing TLD servers are going to cause all kinds of problems if there isn't a centralized controlling presence.
As for the dearth of top level names, I still don't see why anyone would care..com,.org, and.net stopped being meaningful a long time ago and there really aren't too many reasons not to buy a.com. If your chosen name has already been taken, switching to a different TLD is kind of a piecemeal solution. In terms of branding, corporate or personal, you want as simple a domain name as you can get.
There are also the international TLDs to worry about; it seems that these definately require a strong centralized authority to dish out. The Internet may provide the illusion of a united world, but things are still very much focused on individual countries and the international TLDs reflect that. Currently each country is given their own TLD which they can treat as national property, that system makes sense to me. Their sovereignty should not be affected by some random reseller.
In my mind ICANN provides a much needed layer of stability and control over the Internet. For the Internet to work well, there needs to be some entity that provides such a stabilizing influence.
The Dvorak style key layout has been around for a while; if you want to spend alot of time relearning how to type, that's probably your best bet. I myself spent 2 weeks learning a Kinesis keyboard and I still type faster with a standard keyboard. I had generally expected more exploration from the hacker crowd, but really no one has moved from the QWERTY model.
That said, it's always good that people are playing with new designs. If one of my hands got blown off, I'd be pleased to be able to find a custom product like this one. If I were running a keyboard company however, I'd be hesitant to mass produce them.
I live within 200' of a railroad track; in my opinion nothing makes up for the irritation of being so close to the rails. The train itself will drown out almost any noise in the area, but the train whistle definately ranks as one of the most annoying human inventions. They could run fiber right to my doorstep and I still wouldn't want to live there.
It's a matter of tradeoffs I suppose, some Slashdotters might not mind their china vibrating every time a coal train passes by. But consider yourself warned.
I had thought of the same idea when I was downloading some large files from an overworked FTP site where the demand easily outweighed the supply. The idea is that if you have a lot of information to distribute (like some large media files) but don't have the server capability to serve everyone at once, just require everyone to use a program like Swarmcast. The more popular the data is, the more temporary servers are setup, and the transfer may actually go faster. This is in contrast to the current way of distributing data, as the number of transfers increase the speed that any single user can receive the file decreases.
In short, if you're running a popular file server off a standard broadband connection, just have everyone use Swarmcast. It'll ease your bandwidth use by a great deal. And if you're distributing your data for free, your users shouldn't have too much of a problem with installing this software and donating a little of their bandwidth.
This would only really be effective as a hiding mechanism in a rather large organization. A sniffer can still determine that there is a large amount of information flowing between organizations, it just wouldn't be able to tell what. If all you want to do is secure the information, just encrypt a single session. It would be much more efficient.
I suppose if someone wants to write a poor mans' solution, you could just rotate UDP ports rather than actual IPs. This would pretty much befuddle most current sniffing software, it would look like a bunch of small, random sessions rather than one big one. But I still don't quite see what that would get you, the strain on the IP stack and NAT routers would give you an unnecessary performance hit.
I'm all for making technology available that will make a person's life easier and more convenient. This software doesn't really let a parent do anything they couldn't do before, it just makes it a great deal easier for a parent to interface with their child's school.
Of course, like any other technology, this system is open to abuse. It helps to increase the degrees to which a parent can exercise control over their children, perhaps to a damaging degree. In the US it's really up to parents how they want to raise their kids, and if they want to be overbearing and overcontrolling then it's perfectly alright for them to have kids who go to an out of state university, fail out because they've never dealt had freedom before, and live the rest of their lives dreading holidays with their parents. I don't see technology really have impact on parenting, good or bad.
For those of you who are looking for a keyboard perhaps a little different than what you're used to, give a Kinesis contoured keyboard a try (found at www.kinesis-ergo.com). They really are a step above normal keyboards, the keys are situated so that your fingers can hit almost all the keys without any wrist movement. The space/backspace/enter/delete keys are all controlled by your thumb and most of the rest are in pretty easy reach
Of course, it'll take 2 weeks of practice before you're typing at full speed again. And your friends and coworkers will complain every time they try to use your computer. But use one for a while and you'll realize just how antiquated standard keyboards are.
Garriot certainly did some ground breaking stuff. His Ultima series brought a whole sense of realism and proportionality to RPGs, practically every item in the game could be interacted with in some way. At the time, it allowed for some very interesting and sophisticated gameplay.
Of course, for games today such concepts are a given. The ideas that put Garriot on the top are now regularly implemented. He's all but starting over from scratch, whatever he accomplishes won't be able to coast on previous successes.
But on the other hand Mr. Garriot certainly strives to tell a good story, something many of the semi literate game designers don't prioritize anymore. I'll be curious to see what he comes up with, he has a freedom to design games that many of his peers must envy. Hopefully he'll come up with something truly unique and different.
In the long line of cheats that have ruined games, this Asus see-through is pretty much a drop in the bucket. Online gaming is inately unfair to begin with, differences in computer speed or connection latency can easily overwhelm the skills of a player. It irritates me only slightly less that the reason I just got sniped in the head was not due to any cheating, but rather that my opponent had a much lower ping time. Sucks either way.
What also makes many of these cheats so ridiculous is that a proper client/server implementation would have prevented them in the first place. Game designers shove way too much of the game onto the client side, a proper architecture shouldn't allow the client to do anything the user can't do himself. Granted, this isn't perfect; the client side bots ruined Quake despite a near ideal architecture. But in the online world companies have it in their power to arbitrarly alter the program binaries and the communication protocols periodically, this would go far in defeating client side cheats.
Put simply, there is really nothing to prevent a vigilant game company from producing an online game that is pretty close to cheat free. It seems like this would be a good way to get an edge over the competition, it might be worth the energy to implement
Of course, if you really don't want to deal with cheaters, just play an unpopular game. It's the popular ones that get cracked the fastest.
Beyond the obvious invasion of privacy these ID cards are promoting, there is another problem with tracking people across the internet. It is too simple to forge IP information as it is, there is no indication in the article that this new technology will guarantee 100% tracking to a given computer. In a cafe environment there is probably little security between computers, a hacker could use the IP of the computer across the room.
Of course, this level of accountability is so far a fiction, as well it should be. Too many consumer boxes are used as springboards to facilitate hacking elsewhere. The poor sap who owns the computer that is currently doing malicious deeds can't really be held accountable for its actions, to do so wouldn't really solve anything. It seems it will be the same in India, just because the computers say that this IP was accessing this server at this time doesn't actually mean that you can reliably track it to an individual.
Over the long term we'll probably employ a system similiar to this by choice. As people gain better ways to identify themselves online, we'll probably decide to cut the truly anonymous out of our online lives entirely. In the same way Anonymous Cowards are culled from our discussions by default, we'll find our time is too valuable to spend it interacting with someone who can't be bothered to identify themself.
Spamming is an unfortunate consequence of being active on the internet. For example, so long as I own a domain, people will be forever grabbing my address from the domain records. The irony is that the vast majority of addresses that spammers send to must be administrative or at least belong to savvy internet users. I theorize that spammers are no longer buying lists from each other, they're probably actively searching for addresses themselves.
Perhaps one day they'll learn to target their audience and we'll stop receiving spam. Doubt it though.
The amusing thing is that in Diamond Age, Stevenson postulates that information will actually become more valuable than physical objects. Even though you can order up a chair from a local matter compiler, someone spent a good deal of time writing a program so the compiler would know how to assemble a chair. That's the most fascinating thing about the book, even though nanotechnology solves all the problems we might expect it to, it brings about a whole new set of them.
Slashdot Mirror
an aside: it's quite apparent that many slashdot users could really benefit from aquiring some business knowledge simply by the way marketing people are regarded by most people here. ;)
Oh, I don't know, my experiences with marketing has left me with the feeling that Slashdotters regard Marketeers pretty accurately. While I realize that a good marketing team can be a real asset to a company, they are generally given far too much power over things in general. Marketing controls not only advertisements but also the look, feel, taste, and functionality of all the products, which means they spend a lot of time stepping on the toes of the engineers that design the things. I'm sure my bitterness comes from working on computer centric products where I have a good deal in common with the user base, and watching as marketing redesigns things in arbitrary ways for a user group they haven't taken the time to understand. I suspect this is true in most companies, marketing folks redesign cars, make suggestions on how the newest cola should taste, and generally muck around with things without any facts or figures or reasons as to why they're doing it.
I'll stop before this explodes into a full blown rant. I'll merely sum up by saying that due to the nature of their jobs, marketing folks will continue to be the thorn in the side of all engineers. I don't see this changing any time soon.
I also wonder what platform squaresoft is going to contract to next. will they stick with sony? renew their relationship with nintendo? join the evil empire (scary thought)?
As someone who buys consoles on the rule of thumb, "Which ever Square is supporting", I of course bought a PS2 in preperation of FFX. FFXI is also in development as a online only game, made specifically for the PS2. Beyond that, Square has indicated that they're planning on sticking with Sony for future projects and there really isn't any reason for them not to. The reason they bailed on Nintendo was due to Nintendo's reluctance to put a CDROM in their system, so long as Sony provides a viable platform Square has no reason to leave.
Now, if a competitive game system gets enough users, Square may decide it's worth while to hire another team of programmers and try their hand at cross platform development. Really the XBox has to prove itself several million times over before they can establish the clout a console maker needs.
Whether to use open or closed source solutions is closely linked to how IT is handled in the company. If you have a strong internal support staff and everything is generally done in house, open source provides a much nicer solution. If you only want to maintain a minimal internal staff and outsource all you can, commercial solutions are your only choice.
The problem I've run into with Microsoft and other closed technologies is that you're quite literally dealing with a black box. If you have a very good support staff who know what they're doing, very likely they'll want to do more customization than most commercial programs will allow. In my opinion, this is why open technologies are the way to go, an excellent IT group should tailor the environment to their users' needs as closely as possible. Closed systems are designed based on expectations of what a corporate environment needs, not on their actual needs.
Many companies will prefer to be sold their IT solution outright from another company, this way they don't have to maintain an internal IT staff that needs to know more than pick up the phone. If you go the other way though and build a top flight IT group that are expected to handle all problems internally, they'll end up requesting and using open solutions simply because of the flexibility they provide.
Fluorescents already run at 120 hz, they even mentioned that in the article. As great as a high refresh rate is on monitors, it's still the lesser of 2 evils. Once you start using a LCD display, you realize that any flicker, no matter how fast, is provides a visual/mental strain that will probably force every hospital to open a CS wing in 20 years. The moral is that any refresh is something us humans would prefer to avoid.
I guess you could say that the best alternatives are already here, incandescent and halogen already put out great light but aren't very efficient. I suspect fluorescents are as good as they're going to get, the replacement technology will probably be something completely different.
Immigration provides the US with a cyclical nature, one that is mostly unique to us. As people rise the socio-economic ladder here, there is a tendancy to have fewer children. The thing that offsets this population loss is immigration. Especially now, with the Baby Boomers set to retire and then die, recent immigrants are providing a necessary population base to keep this country moving smoothly. The key is that as generations pass, there is a continual rise up the economic ladder for people whose ancestors were immigrants.
The US really isn't a country in the traditional sense. Our country was founded as a union of states and only became a country out of necessity. Our popular culture is a eclectic mix of various previous cultures. The melting pot theory is commonly thought to be antiquated, in my mind there is still truth in that metaphor.
This same thought had occured to me a while back, I just assumed Square would do a special Japanese dub if only out of pride. Granted that the Japanese market is half the size of the US, and most people who are interested will probably see it regardless of which language it's in, but it just seems a slap in the face to the Japanese consumers to only do it in English. There is just as much brand loyalty in Japan as there is in the US and Square's fan base would have kept them afloat even if they never exported a game.
Of course, they would've done it by now if it was easy to do. The movie is modeled on the real actors, so the visuals and the voices aren't completely seperated. But still, it seems like there are enough tricks one could do with a little facial morphing and creative dubbing. And from the looks of the previews, the most expensive scenes to render don't seem to have a lot of focus on mouth movements.
Square continues to impress me with the exceptional quality of their games, but there is more they could do. While releasing Final Fantasy's in the states 6 months after their release in Japan is impressive, I still don't see why they can't do both versions simultaneously. In this modern world we live in, any company that can develop for multiple languages at the same time will certainly be several steps beyond their competitors.
Sorry, can't really think about any aspects of this case without focusing on how stupid these hackers were in the first place. I mean, geeze, if you want to become a criminal you've got to act like one all the time. This usually translates into keeping a low profile, a pretty common skill for most traditional criminals. Of course this may be the easiest way to catch computer criminals, appeal to their hubris by offering them a job for a lot of money.
I really don't see what all the hubbub is about. Currently you can buy a domain name of your choosing for $35/yr, I can't think of anything else that gets you anywhere close to that kind of cost/benefit ratio. The money goes to maintain DNS servers that pretty much never go down, that level of reliability is critical for the Internet to function. I've had enough trouble just dealing with ISP DNS servers, a bunch of competing TLD servers are going to cause all kinds of problems if there isn't a centralized controlling presence.
As for the dearth of top level names, I still don't see why anyone would care. .com, .org, and .net stopped being meaningful a long time ago and there really aren't too many reasons not to buy a .com. If your chosen name has already been taken, switching to a different TLD is kind of a piecemeal solution. In terms of branding, corporate or personal, you want as simple a domain name as you can get.
There are also the international TLDs to worry about; it seems that these definately require a strong centralized authority to dish out. The Internet may provide the illusion of a united world, but things are still very much focused on individual countries and the international TLDs reflect that. Currently each country is given their own TLD which they can treat as national property, that system makes sense to me. Their sovereignty should not be affected by some random reseller.
In my mind ICANN provides a much needed layer of stability and control over the Internet. For the Internet to work well, there needs to be some entity that provides such a stabilizing influence.
The Dvorak style key layout has been around for a while; if you want to spend alot of time relearning how to type, that's probably your best bet. I myself spent 2 weeks learning a Kinesis keyboard and I still type faster with a standard keyboard. I had generally expected more exploration from the hacker crowd, but really no one has moved from the QWERTY model.
That said, it's always good that people are playing with new designs. If one of my hands got blown off, I'd be pleased to be able to find a custom product like this one. If I were running a keyboard company however, I'd be hesitant to mass produce them.
I live within 200' of a railroad track; in my opinion nothing makes up for the irritation of being so close to the rails. The train itself will drown out almost any noise in the area, but the train whistle definately ranks as one of the most annoying human inventions. They could run fiber right to my doorstep and I still wouldn't want to live there.
It's a matter of tradeoffs I suppose, some Slashdotters might not mind their china vibrating every time a coal train passes by. But consider yourself warned.
I had thought of the same idea when I was downloading some large files from an overworked FTP site where the demand easily outweighed the supply. The idea is that if you have a lot of information to distribute (like some large media files) but don't have the server capability to serve everyone at once, just require everyone to use a program like Swarmcast. The more popular the data is, the more temporary servers are setup, and the transfer may actually go faster. This is in contrast to the current way of distributing data, as the number of transfers increase the speed that any single user can receive the file decreases.
In short, if you're running a popular file server off a standard broadband connection, just have everyone use Swarmcast. It'll ease your bandwidth use by a great deal. And if you're distributing your data for free, your users shouldn't have too much of a problem with installing this software and donating a little of their bandwidth.
This would only really be effective as a hiding mechanism in a rather large organization. A sniffer can still determine that there is a large amount of information flowing between organizations, it just wouldn't be able to tell what. If all you want to do is secure the information, just encrypt a single session. It would be much more efficient.
I suppose if someone wants to write a poor mans' solution, you could just rotate UDP ports rather than actual IPs. This would pretty much befuddle most current sniffing software, it would look like a bunch of small, random sessions rather than one big one. But I still don't quite see what that would get you, the strain on the IP stack and NAT routers would give you an unnecessary performance hit.
I'm all for making technology available that will make a person's life easier and more convenient. This software doesn't really let a parent do anything they couldn't do before, it just makes it a great deal easier for a parent to interface with their child's school.
Of course, like any other technology, this system is open to abuse. It helps to increase the degrees to which a parent can exercise control over their children, perhaps to a damaging degree. In the US it's really up to parents how they want to raise their kids, and if they want to be overbearing and overcontrolling then it's perfectly alright for them to have kids who go to an out of state university, fail out because they've never dealt had freedom before, and live the rest of their lives dreading holidays with their parents. I don't see technology really have impact on parenting, good or bad.
For those of you who are looking for a keyboard perhaps a little different than what you're used to, give a Kinesis contoured keyboard a try (found at www.kinesis-ergo.com). They really are a step above normal keyboards, the keys are situated so that your fingers can hit almost all the keys without any wrist movement. The space/backspace/enter/delete keys are all controlled by your thumb and most of the rest are in pretty easy reach
Of course, it'll take 2 weeks of practice before you're typing at full speed again. And your friends and coworkers will complain every time they try to use your computer. But use one for a while and you'll realize just how antiquated standard keyboards are.
Garriot certainly did some ground breaking stuff. His Ultima series brought a whole sense of realism and proportionality to RPGs, practically every item in the game could be interacted with in some way. At the time, it allowed for some very interesting and sophisticated gameplay.
Of course, for games today such concepts are a given. The ideas that put Garriot on the top are now regularly implemented. He's all but starting over from scratch, whatever he accomplishes won't be able to coast on previous successes.
But on the other hand Mr. Garriot certainly strives to tell a good story, something many of the semi literate game designers don't prioritize anymore. I'll be curious to see what he comes up with, he has a freedom to design games that many of his peers must envy. Hopefully he'll come up with something truly unique and different.
In the long line of cheats that have ruined games, this Asus see-through is pretty much a drop in the bucket. Online gaming is inately unfair to begin with, differences in computer speed or connection latency can easily overwhelm the skills of a player. It irritates me only slightly less that the reason I just got sniped in the head was not due to any cheating, but rather that my opponent had a much lower ping time. Sucks either way.
What also makes many of these cheats so ridiculous is that a proper client/server implementation would have prevented them in the first place. Game designers shove way too much of the game onto the client side, a proper architecture shouldn't allow the client to do anything the user can't do himself. Granted, this isn't perfect; the client side bots ruined Quake despite a near ideal architecture. But in the online world companies have it in their power to arbitrarly alter the program binaries and the communication protocols periodically, this would go far in defeating client side cheats.
Put simply, there is really nothing to prevent a vigilant game company from producing an online game that is pretty close to cheat free. It seems like this would be a good way to get an edge over the competition, it might be worth the energy to implement
Of course, if you really don't want to deal with cheaters, just play an unpopular game. It's the popular ones that get cracked the fastest.
Beyond the obvious invasion of privacy these ID cards are promoting, there is another problem with tracking people across the internet. It is too simple to forge IP information as it is, there is no indication in the article that this new technology will guarantee 100% tracking to a given computer. In a cafe environment there is probably little security between computers, a hacker could use the IP of the computer across the room.
Of course, this level of accountability is so far a fiction, as well it should be. Too many consumer boxes are used as springboards to facilitate hacking elsewhere. The poor sap who owns the computer that is currently doing malicious deeds can't really be held accountable for its actions, to do so wouldn't really solve anything. It seems it will be the same in India, just because the computers say that this IP was accessing this server at this time doesn't actually mean that you can reliably track it to an individual.
Over the long term we'll probably employ a system similiar to this by choice. As people gain better ways to identify themselves online, we'll probably decide to cut the truly anonymous out of our online lives entirely. In the same way Anonymous Cowards are culled from our discussions by default, we'll find our time is too valuable to spend it interacting with someone who can't be bothered to identify themself.
Spamming is an unfortunate consequence of being active on the internet. For example, so long as I own a domain, people will be forever grabbing my address from the domain records. The irony is that the vast majority of addresses that spammers send to must be administrative or at least belong to savvy internet users. I theorize that spammers are no longer buying lists from each other, they're probably actively searching for addresses themselves.
Perhaps one day they'll learn to target their audience and we'll stop receiving spam. Doubt it though.
The amusing thing is that in Diamond Age, Stevenson postulates that information will actually become more valuable than physical objects. Even though you can order up a chair from a local matter compiler, someone spent a good deal of time writing a program so the compiler would know how to assemble a chair. That's the most fascinating thing about the book, even though nanotechnology solves all the problems we might expect it to, it brings about a whole new set of them.