It's irrelevant what license other kernel developers are using. If you want to contribute to a BK competitor and the kernel you need to either pay for BK, not use BK, or ask Larry nicely for an exception (which he has said he's willing to consider in individual cases). I can't see anything wrong with that policy.
It's not the BK license and policy actually. I think that what bothers me is that the Kernel developers agreed to use BK, putting some others in this uncomfortable situation.
I usually don't, butif you read the BK license, you will notice that it disallows you to work on competitors (including CVS and subversion) if you are a BK user. I think at least one of the subversion developers (who also contributes to the Linux Kernel) is not allowed to send Kernel patched using BK because of that (he sends them via email).
the point of a library isnt to increase raw attendance, it's to provide access to a large quantity of books that the majority of people could not purchase or conveniently locate on their own.
Exactly! But there's one more thing... The quality of what people read! (No, I'm not politically correct.) If all that people read in the library are crappy/superficial romances written by people who usually write one book every month, or something like that, I don't think they'll benefit a lot from that (although it's better than not reading at all, of course). It would be nice to have something less passive and more interesting: a place where people go to get together and think/discuss/etc.
I've got dozens and dozens of CD's with holes all in them, like someone sprayed acid on them or something, it's not eaten through the plastic at all, just the foil is gone. It's really weird. I can't explain what it is for sure
Someone correct me if I'm wrong, but isn't that a kind of fungus that eats the internal part of CDs? It could be what you're describing.
I don't like when I'm pessimistic, but... Things don't look good, really. This sort of episode shows that people doing things based on laws and pressure from whoever-is-big-and-says-he-is-losing-money (sometimes not even money). One important thing that is being ignored more and more is common sense. This is not only related to copyrights, but to a lot of other things (international relations, etc).
Maybe it will be too late when they find out that laws don't fix problems? That problems shouldn't happen in the first place? And that laws shouldn't be viewd as "the truely correct thing", which can be used as an excuse to do all kinds of weird and crazy things (because the law says I have this "right")? Even if the industry technically has the "right" to fight piracy, did they think about it first? Do the artists understand what's going on? Surely they don't. They just believe what they are told... That "the evil people are taking away their money, and that they'll be doomed if nothing is done".
OK, I feel better now that I said this... But I'm still pessimistic.
People need to realize that most kids don't have a desire to learn these things, and most teachers don't have a desire to teach. Kids go because it's publicly funded babysitting, teachers go to get paid. At some point grades become relevant, and kids learn to do whatever it is they have to do to pass the classes. When it becomes necessary to accomplish some goal, the material will be learned.
YES! And unfortunately, "whatever it is they have to do to pass" is not necessarily learning. Also, "whatever is necessary to be successful" usually doesn't involve learning anything or getting too much education (when "successful" means "rich" or "famous").
I like math, I hate problem solving, I hate memorizing useless calculations, formulas, steps and rules. I like logic, I like thinking, I don't like calculations and brute force memorization.
Math became more and more abstract, but then people started to neglect the concrete... There should be a balance between the two. See the preface to Don Knuth's "Concrete Mathematics": he graduated in Math and was frustrated beause although he knew a lot of abstract stuff, he couldn't do the concrete math necessary to work with Computer Science and Algorithms.
No one on earth can change my likes or dislikes. The only thing which you can do is simply make the math more likeable to different types of people instead of just making it fun for problem solvers.
Yes, but we could try to find ways to make kids more interested in different kinds of things. In this case, we should find a way to show them the importance of the balance between concrete and abstract.
Personally, I also think that too math and not enough arts make people unhappy, but that's another discussion...
The first thing that needs to be done to revitalize math and science learning is to remove the stigmas associated with it. These stigmas were not present to the degree they are today in the 50's and 60's. This is one of the reasons that we were able to pull of some amazing feats (such as the space program in the 60's and the microprocessors in the 70's) during those times.
Good point! I think that more important than any computational or non-computational tool, the key is motivation! It seems to me that kids learn easier with software tools because it's "cool" (as opposed to a boring class taught by a guy writing on a blackboard). But then, why is the class boring? This is an important point: after computers become very common and are not "exciting" anymore, will we have to find another way to trick students into liking math?
Just my 0.2... And I'm not really sure I believe what I just said.:-)
I don't like that. Anything that says "It's OK to send SPAM, so long as..." sounds bad to me. It's some kind of positive reinforcement to spammers... But maybe I'm not flexible enough? I just think I shouldn't be forced to use my bandwidth and CPU time to get a message and check that it's SPAM, even if "it's always tagged as such".
Certainly, the average joe not having access to the internet would make the internet secure, so that would appear to be successful.
The only issue is that this would be in violation of principles about freedom, principles which many people may not care about.
Absolutely right. And has been said looong time ago. See Jung's "Present and Future". He warned against treating people as if they were all like the average.
Unfortunately, even though there may be better solutions, people (specially politicians and tech-only "experts who got no sensibility at all) tend to gravitate towards solutions that work well quantitatively. For the politicians, what matters is the numbers they show (and the number of votes they get). For the not-sensible-techs, the problem is that they understand numbers much more than they understand anything else - so numbers become a priority for them.
I found automata quite useful when I spent a few years reading RFCs on network protocols, and writing or debugging finite state machines that modelled the protocols in clients or servers.
Not only that. It's usually one of the courses that makes people start doign abstract reasoning more heavily (along with others like Algebra). It's so important, but seems to be difficult to see. The sutdent learns how to generalize concepts - formally! And to prove things, and to map concepts onto frameworks, formalize ideas... This is much more useful later than it seems at first.
but as you preach about students cheating themselves of learning, you forget that teachers nowadays are cheating themselves of actually teaching. It truly is a rarity that a college or university instructor can excite students and engage them to participate
I speak for me only. And I take several hours of my time to prepare my classes. I try to make people understand why they're taking the course, how they can use what they're learning, and try to make the course funny. I go back and explain what they don't understand. But there's a limit to what I can do - and I have to deal with students that already have the idea that "the course is useless".:-(
Maybe these degrees have been either overestimated in their value to the person, or maybe misunderstood?
I have students who really don't need a degree. They're employees of the state, and a degree helps them in their career (or they think so).
Others are mecahnics, technicians, and so on... not in the same area they're taking the course. But they feel inferior because they don't have a degree from a University or College. (!) So the College now has some sort of psychological-social role. Students don't need to learn. They want to have it on the wall, and in their resumes.
But when we pout them with others who want to learn in the same classroom, a collective attitude develops, and the guys who don't want to learn are usually able to take others with them.
And even those who don't care would benefit from the courses, if they understood how much they would improve their reasoning - but it's not worth the work, I guess.
I don't know. It actually looks to me like "a system that has grown too much, and just as anything that goes that way, it's gone out of control".
I took away one maybe two concepts of my entire undergraduate experience that helped me afterwards.
You probably have no idea how much you (as a person) changed in that time. You did not only "learn concepts". You did learn skills (and didn't even notice!) This seems to be a common misunderstanding. You don't go to College/University to learn "a list of concepts", or "how to do things". You learn a lot more there. You learn different ways of thinking, writing skills, and if we really look at it, you learn social skills, you somehow acquire a new identity, you train your brain to do abstract reasoning, to use your intuition, to tell "elegant" from "ugly" solutions to problems - and depending on how difficult your course is, you really learn about initiative. And lots of other things that I can't remember now...
So - don't think it wasn't worth. Just the otehr day another teacher was talking about one of the students - "you wouldn't believe how much this guy changed since he got here".
I've taken my share of courses with 100-300 people. You should still be able to catch cheating without violating your student's coprights. Heck, at Cornell, they regularly catch students cheating in PSYCH101 with has more than 300 students.
No, it isn't easy. I teach more than 200 people, and it's impossible to keep track of everything without automated help. Really. And more students would probably be caught if some ystem like that was used.
Or - this is interesting - maybe the school managed to develop a different culture within the students? Instead of "let's pass this course", it's "let's learn this thing"? This is getting more and more difficult to find out there (because of population growth and because more people have acess to education - in my opinion)
And why this thing about copyrights? It's just like a test. Who's got the copyright of a test? And who cares? The point is just to check if you've really learned.
And when you are a student, you're supposed to write texts and handle them to other people (your teacher, or a comitee, or someone else), so... The only difference is in who happens to read your work. But hey - what if you complained to your boss that "showing your report to a business partner violates your copyrights"? (You wouldn't even hold the copyright in that case!)
and would you believe a I had an instructor last term who showed up unprepared for lecture but projected an online version of the textbook onto a screen in the front of the room and tried to speed-read it as he lectured with his back to the class?
So would the instructors agree to have all of their lecture notes pre-processed by the same plagerism software so that the schools and students know they're getting the original instructional resources they paid for and a copy of readily available material?
But that's using one error to justify another. A teacher shouldn't only read. He is supposed to explain, and "make people learn". Now... He may need to use some text that's already been written instead of reinventing the wheel (like using a textbook, for example). Not for reading in class, but so students may follow the subject, and catch up if they've missed something.
I never "read" in class. I usually take lots of time to prepare classes, and build concepts gradually, give exercises, and always - always - ask if everyone is understanding what I'm talking about.
And still, there are the guys who just want their degree, and it doesn't matter to them if they're going to learn anything or not. And I'm sorry - but they will make others feel like them. It's a contagious feeling ("who cares? Let's have a beer"). It's hard for the others to resist.
But that idea is true, at least in some majors. In computer science, I took dozens of courses that were just busy work basically. I took maybe 3 or 4 courses that have actually proven useful to the real world.
All the rest were totally irrelevant crap, and I would have missed nothing by cheating.
That's because you think you should be able to "directly apply" what you learn in the courses. It's not how it works (we don't want to turn people into robots who can "perform tasks"). We want to make people develop all kinds of skills. Writing, analysis, synthesis, abstract reasoning, planning, and other things. It may not be immediately clear that the courses will help you. But they will. Also, studying in depth only turns you into a walking stereotype of "The nerd". Some of the courses make you work on breadth too, besides depth.
First, I do find it a bit offensive to presume cheating on the part of students and to require them to "prove" they didn't cheat
I agree. But it's certainly better than jsut letting students develop the idea that "researching a subject" means "doing a google search". (And in Brazil, where I teach, the words "research", that we use in assignments and "search", for google are the same, "pesquisa").
But anyway... Students also need to learn not to take offense. Hey, ti's the rules. Are they offended because they have to take tests? No. It's better to learn the right attitude towards tests and systems like this than just complaining that it presumes the student didn't learn.
I took a great course on Compiler Construction here... And we all had to suybmit our assignments to an automated system designed by the teacher - and no students had a problem with it.
I am a teacher... And you guys wouldn't believe how much stuff students just copy from the Internet, or from other students.
It's important to make students understand taht plagiarism just doesn't help them. They're losing a great opportunity to learn, and to develop their writing skills and intelligence, and maybe abstract reasoning, or whatever the subject requires from them. But unfortunately, some of them just don't care -- and these will slowly, er, "contaminate" (sorry, I'm not politically correct - really) the others with the idea that "you just need pass the course". you can learn what you need "later". This kind of system helps to keep things under control (sort of), by discouraging them. I'd be happy i this wasn't necessary, but as far as I see, there's no other option (in particular for people like me, who have classes with 100 students, or something close to taht).
Of course, it's much better if you have just a few students, and can read and detect plagiarism yourself. But hey, nobody wil give me a 10 student class. It's too expensive.:-(
The FTAA has been in development since 1998, and its not even supposed to be completed until 2005, there's still a lot of room for changes in it. Luckilly, Brazil has led the push for more reasonable IP rights
I am Brazilian, and I really doubt that our government really cares about "reasonable IP rights".
An example... Our relatively recent law that regulates Software Property says that once you've worked for a company developing software, the company can claim ownership of ANYTHING you do. For 2 years. After you're out. And it's up to YOU to prove they're wrong. Beautiful, isn't it? (There are other weirdnesses that I won't get into here)
So, I wouldn't be too enthusiastic about how the Brazilian governemnt behaves in the negotiations. (They'll be nice, so long as it's politically interesting to them)
Call me paranoid, but...
I wonder if they'll try to revert the situation, or come up with some other (equally hazardous) idea to replace this one.
If they invested some money into the idea, I guess they won't give up that easily.
Slashdot Mirror
It's irrelevant what license other kernel developers are using. If you want to contribute to a BK competitor and the kernel you need to either pay for BK, not use BK, or ask Larry nicely for an exception (which he has said he's willing to consider in individual cases). I can't see anything wrong with that policy.
It's not the BK license and policy actually. I think that what bothers me is that the Kernel developers agreed to use BK, putting some others in this uncomfortable situation.
IIRC, the "not for BK competitor" is for the free version, the paid version has no such restrictions.
Which is the one used for Kernel development, if I'm not mistaken...
Who cares if it's Free or not?
I usually don't, butif you read the BK license, you will notice that it disallows you to work on competitors (including CVS and subversion) if you are a BK user. I think at least one of the subversion developers (who also contributes to the Linux Kernel) is not allowed to send Kernel patched using BK because of that (he sends them via email).
the point of a library isnt to increase raw attendance, it's to provide access to a large quantity of books that the majority of people could not purchase or conveniently locate on their own.
Exactly! But there's one more thing... The quality of what people read! (No, I'm not politically correct.) If all that people read in the library are crappy/superficial romances written by people who usually write one book every month, or something like that, I don't think they'll benefit a lot from that (although it's better than not reading at all, of course). It would be nice to have something less passive and more interesting: a place where people go to get together and think/discuss/etc.
I've got dozens and dozens of CD's with holes all in them, like someone sprayed acid on them or something, it's not eaten through the plastic at all, just the foil is gone. It's really weird. I can't explain what it is for sure
Someone correct me if I'm wrong, but isn't that a kind of fungus that eats the internal part of CDs? It could be what you're describing.
I don't like when I'm pessimistic, but... Things don't look good, really. This sort of episode shows that people doing things based on laws and pressure from whoever-is-big-and-says-he-is-losing-money (sometimes not even money). One important thing that is being ignored more and more is common sense. This is not only related to copyrights, but to a lot of other things (international relations, etc).
Maybe it will be too late when they find out that laws don't fix problems? That problems shouldn't happen in the first place? And that laws shouldn't be viewd as "the truely correct thing", which can be used as an excuse to do all kinds of weird and crazy things (because the law says I have this "right")? Even if the industry technically has the "right" to fight piracy, did they think about it first? Do the artists understand what's going on? Surely they don't. They just believe what they are told... That "the evil people are taking away their money, and that they'll be doomed if nothing is done".
OK, I feel better now that I said this... But I'm still pessimistic.
People need to realize that most kids don't have a desire to learn these things, and most teachers don't have a desire to teach. Kids go because it's publicly funded babysitting, teachers go to get paid. At some point grades become relevant, and kids learn to do whatever it is they have to do to pass the classes. When it becomes necessary to accomplish some goal, the material will be learned.
YES! And unfortunately, "whatever it is they have to do to pass" is not necessarily learning. Also, "whatever is necessary to be successful" usually doesn't involve learning anything or getting too much education (when "successful" means "rich" or "famous").
I like math, I hate problem solving, I hate memorizing useless calculations, formulas, steps and rules. I like logic, I like thinking, I don't like calculations and brute force memorization.
Math became more and more abstract, but then people started to neglect the concrete... There should be a balance between the two. See the preface to Don Knuth's "Concrete Mathematics": he graduated in Math and was frustrated beause although he knew a lot of abstract stuff, he couldn't do the concrete math necessary to work with Computer Science and Algorithms.
No one on earth can change my likes or dislikes. The only thing which you can do is simply make the math more likeable to different types of people instead of just making it fun for problem solvers.
Yes, but we could try to find ways to make kids more interested in different kinds of things. In this case, we should find a way to show them the importance of the balance between concrete and abstract.
Personally, I also think that too math and not enough arts make people unhappy, but that's another discussion...
The first thing that needs to be done to revitalize math and science learning is to remove the stigmas associated with it. These stigmas were not present to the degree they are today in the 50's and 60's. This is one of the reasons that we were able to pull of some amazing feats (such as the space program in the 60's and the microprocessors in the 70's) during those times.
:-)
Good point! I think that more important than any computational or non-computational tool, the key is motivation! It seems to me that kids learn easier with software tools because it's "cool" (as opposed to a boring class taught by a guy writing on a blackboard). But then, why is the class boring? This is an important point: after computers become very common and are not "exciting" anymore, will we have to find another way to trick students into liking math?
Just my 0.2... And I'm not really sure I believe what I just said.
I don't like that. Anything that says "It's OK to send SPAM, so long as..." sounds bad to me. It's some kind of positive reinforcement to spammers... But maybe I'm not flexible enough? I just think I shouldn't be forced to use my bandwidth and CPU time to get a message and check that it's SPAM, even if "it's always tagged as such".
Certainly, the average joe not having access to the internet would make the internet secure, so that would appear to be successful.
The only issue is that this would be in violation of principles about freedom, principles which many people may not care about.
Absolutely right. And has been said looong time ago. See Jung's "Present and Future". He warned against treating people as if they were all like the average.
Unfortunately, even though there may be better solutions, people (specially politicians and tech-only "experts who got no sensibility at all) tend to gravitate towards solutions that work well quantitatively. For the politicians, what matters is the numbers they show (and the number of votes they get). For the not-sensible-techs, the problem is that they understand numbers much more than they understand anything else - so numbers become a priority for them.
I already had those skills. Why did I have to waste 4 years to "prove" it?
Well - how can you be sure you were as good as you are now? (
I found automata quite useful when I spent a few years reading RFCs on network protocols, and writing or debugging finite state machines that modelled the protocols in clients or servers.
Not only that. It's usually one of the courses that makes people start doign abstract reasoning more heavily (along with others like Algebra). It's so important, but seems to be difficult to see. The sutdent learns how to generalize concepts - formally! And to prove things, and to map concepts onto frameworks, formalize ideas... This is much more useful later than it seems at first.
but as you preach about students cheating themselves of learning, you forget that teachers nowadays are cheating themselves of actually teaching. It truly is a rarity that a college or university instructor can excite students and engage them to participate
:-(
I speak for me only. And I take several hours of my time to prepare my classes. I try to make people understand why they're taking the course, how they can use what they're learning, and try to make the course funny. I go back and explain what they don't understand. But there's a limit to what I can do - and I have to deal with students that already have the idea that "the course is useless".
Maybe these degrees have been either overestimated in their value to the person, or maybe misunderstood?
I have students who really don't need a degree. They're employees of the state, and a degree helps them in their career (or they think so).
Others are mecahnics, technicians, and so on... not in the same area they're taking the course. But they feel inferior because they don't have a degree from a University or College. (!) So the College now has some sort of psychological-social role. Students don't need to learn. They want to have it on the wall, and in their resumes.
But when we pout them with others who want to learn in the same classroom, a collective attitude develops, and the guys who don't want to learn are usually able to take others with them.
And even those who don't care would benefit from the courses, if they understood how much they would improve their reasoning - but it's not worth the work, I guess.
I don't know. It actually looks to me like "a system that has grown too much, and just as anything that goes that way, it's gone out of control".
I took away one maybe two concepts of my entire undergraduate experience that helped me afterwards.
You probably have no idea how much you (as a person) changed in that time. You did not only "learn concepts". You did learn skills (and didn't even notice!) This seems to be a common misunderstanding. You don't go to College/University to learn "a list of concepts", or "how to do things". You learn a lot more there. You learn different ways of thinking, writing skills, and if we really look at it, you learn social skills, you somehow acquire a new identity, you train your brain to do abstract reasoning, to use your intuition, to tell "elegant" from "ugly" solutions to problems - and depending on how difficult your course is, you really learn about initiative. And lots of other things that I can't remember now...
So - don't think it wasn't worth. Just the otehr day another teacher was talking about one of the students - "you wouldn't believe how much this guy changed since he got here".
I've taken my share of courses with 100-300 people. You should still be able to catch cheating without violating your student's coprights. Heck, at Cornell, they regularly catch students cheating in PSYCH101 with has more than 300 students.
No, it isn't easy. I teach more than 200 people, and it's impossible to keep track of everything without automated help. Really. And more students would probably be caught if some ystem like that was used.
Or - this is interesting - maybe the school managed to develop a different culture within the students? Instead of "let's pass this course", it's "let's learn this thing"? This is getting more and more difficult to find out there (because of population growth and because more people have acess to education - in my opinion)
And why this thing about copyrights? It's just like a test. Who's got the copyright of a test? And who cares? The point is just to check if you've really learned. And when you are a student, you're supposed to write texts and handle them to other people (your teacher, or a comitee, or someone else), so... The only difference is in who happens to read your work. But hey - what if you complained to your boss that "showing your report to a business partner violates your copyrights"? (You wouldn't even hold the copyright in that case!)
What would be nice is for all of you complaining about rampant cheating to honestly say how many of your students cheat vs how many do not.
Honestly - I gave an assignment to 90 students last year. 5 were original. I returned all the others with the original URL attached.
and would you believe a I had an instructor last term who showed up unprepared for lecture but projected an online version of the textbook onto a screen in the front of the room and tried to speed-read it as he lectured with his back to the class?
So would the instructors agree to have all of their lecture notes pre-processed by the same plagerism software so that the schools and students know they're getting the original instructional resources they paid for and a copy of readily available material?
But that's using one error to justify another. A teacher shouldn't only read. He is supposed to explain, and "make people learn". Now... He may need to use some text that's already been written instead of reinventing the wheel (like using a textbook, for example). Not for reading in class, but so students may follow the subject, and catch up if they've missed something.
I never "read" in class. I usually take lots of time to prepare classes, and build concepts gradually, give exercises, and always - always - ask if everyone is understanding what I'm talking about.
And still, there are the guys who just want their degree, and it doesn't matter to them if they're going to learn anything or not. And I'm sorry - but they will make others feel like them. It's a contagious feeling ("who cares? Let's have a beer"). It's hard for the others to resist.
But that idea is true, at least in some majors. In computer science, I took dozens of courses that were just busy work basically. I took maybe 3 or 4 courses that have actually proven useful to the real world.
All the rest were totally irrelevant crap, and I would have missed nothing by cheating.
That's because you think you should be able to "directly apply" what you learn in the courses. It's not how it works (we don't want to turn people into robots who can "perform tasks"). We want to make people develop all kinds of skills. Writing, analysis, synthesis, abstract reasoning, planning, and other things. It may not be immediately clear that the courses will help you. But they will. Also, studying in depth only turns you into a walking stereotype of "The nerd". Some of the courses make you work on breadth too, besides depth.
First, I do find it a bit offensive to presume cheating on the part of students and to require them to "prove" they didn't cheat
I agree. But it's certainly better than jsut letting students develop the idea that "researching a subject" means "doing a google search". (And in Brazil, where I teach, the words "research", that we use in assignments and "search", for google are the same, "pesquisa").
But anyway... Students also need to learn not to take offense. Hey, ti's the rules. Are they offended because they have to take tests? No. It's better to learn the right attitude towards tests and systems like this than just complaining that it presumes the student didn't learn. I took a great course on Compiler Construction here... And we all had to suybmit our assignments to an automated system designed by the teacher - and no students had a problem with it.
I am a teacher... And you guys wouldn't believe how much stuff students just copy from the Internet, or from other students.
:-(
It's important to make students understand taht plagiarism just doesn't help them. They're losing a great opportunity to learn, and to develop their writing skills and intelligence, and maybe abstract reasoning, or whatever the subject requires from them. But unfortunately, some of them just don't care -- and these will slowly, er, "contaminate" (sorry, I'm not politically correct - really) the others with the idea that "you just need pass the course". you can learn what you need "later". This kind of system helps to keep things under control (sort of), by discouraging them. I'd be happy i this wasn't necessary, but as far as I see, there's no other option (in particular for people like me, who have classes with 100 students, or something close to taht).
Of course, it's much better if you have just a few students, and can read and detect plagiarism yourself. But hey, nobody wil give me a 10 student class. It's too expensive.
Will Debian have to move APT to non-us now?
What about the BSD ports tree? How old is it? Would it be possible to consider that prior art?
The FTAA has been in development since 1998, and its not even supposed to be completed until 2005, there's still a lot of room for changes in it. Luckilly, Brazil has led the push for more reasonable IP rights
I am Brazilian, and I really doubt that our government really cares about "reasonable IP rights".
An example... Our relatively recent law that regulates Software Property says that once you've worked for a company developing software, the company can claim ownership of ANYTHING you do. For 2 years. After you're out. And it's up to YOU to prove they're wrong. Beautiful, isn't it? (There are other weirdnesses that I won't get into here)
So, I wouldn't be too enthusiastic about how the Brazilian governemnt behaves in the negotiations. (They'll be nice, so long as it's politically interesting to them)
Call me paranoid, but... I wonder if they'll try to revert the situation, or come up with some other (equally hazardous) idea to replace this one. If they invested some money into the idea, I guess they won't give up that easily.
I wonder if there's hope of a distributed/P2P anti-spam network? People are willing to offer cycles for SETI and folding, why not spam fighting?
Yes, people are thinking about that. Check NANAE.