As much as I like how the game of Football plays, I will forever see it as one of the brain injury sports.
The Boston University School of Medicine studied 35 brains of former pro Football players. They found evidence of chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE) in 34 of them. The disease can lead to sufferers experiencing memory loss, dementia and depression.
It's fun to watch and play, but I can't support a sport that knowingly puts hundreds of thousands of kids through that. I don't know how much of this they knew when they published it, but the Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal comic about Headbrick was frighteningly accurate.
To make it safe, they would have to turn it into what we currently call “flag” or “touch” Football. It would be a different sport.
I think so too. The article from theatlantic also mentioned protecting proprietary technology.
The addition of high-tech components to everyday items makes production more complicated, and that means U.S. production is more attractive, not just because manufacturers now have more proprietary technology to protect, but because American workers are more skilled, on average, than their Chinese counterparts.
Aside from handing over patents, I've read that it is routine for Chinese factories to secretly sell authentic brand products to counterfeiters. It's hard to compete with counterfeiters when they're selling the real thing at a discount.
This sounds like another case of The Insourcing Boom. Companies are finally seeing at the total cost of outsourcing. Cook mentioned that Apple already has to make some parts in the US and pay to ship them out to the manufacturing plants overseas, and that's only one of the common costs.
The interview doesn't go into a lot of details on Apple's move to US manufacturing, but a big part of the outsourcing cost is what you lose when you separate your product development from the manufacturing process. This comment from Tim Cook speaks to that:
In addition, we have hundreds of people that reside in China in the plants on a full-time basis that are helping with manufacturing and working on manufacturing process and so forth. The truth is we couldn’t innovate at the speed we do if we viewed manufacturing as this disconnected thing. It’s integrated. So it’s a part of our process.
I'm guessing this move to insource is not philanthropic, it's a smart business decision in the long run, just like General Electric's.
It says that XKCD passwords (at least 18 lower case characters) would take insane amounts of time to crack, but it doesn't give numbers for a rainbow table attack; that's where an attacker makes all combinations of 1 to 4 words from a list of common ones and tries those first. They would also try word separators like spaces, underscores, dashes and even odd symbols. Those don't add much to the total search space though.
A rainbow table attack would reduce XKCD passwords to about 2048^4 (most use 4 words from a list of 2048 common ones). That's a search space of 1.76×10^13. That would take about 54 centuries of online cracking, 30 minutes of offline cracking and 1.5 seconds of offline mega-cluster hacking. That's not so good.
If you stick a single symbol character into the middle of one of your words (@, #, %, &, etc.), the rainbow attack fails and the search space goes back up to 2.66 x 10^35, or 8.45 hundred billion centuries to crack offline with a mega-cluster. Effectively uncrackable.
Even three words with a random symbol would take 1.18 thousand centuries offline with a mega-cluster. I think I'll go with that from now on.
The Palladium RPG aims more for realism and combat simulation. It can get tedious, but it's pretty flexible in the amount of detail you can enforce.
They also have a lot of books that apply their system to completely different settings like modern day and sci-fi. Heroes Unlimited and Ninjas and Superspies work pretty well together.
This discussion thread is only for those of us who do not read the article. There will be another post later that actually links to the article to allow those annoying fact checkers to join in.
You can spin this story the other way. If the traditional media industry in the US managed to have a foreign company seized using current laws, they obviously have no need of new ones like SOPA and PIPA.
Read just one of their reviews and you'll learn about all of the most important things to look for in a camera. Their camera database is amazing for narrowing down your options once you have an idea of your price range and what you want.
That seems to be the case and it seems rather innapropriate here. Perhaps rather than defining legal liabilities, lawmakers may have to start defining legal exemptions to keep frivolous litigations at bay.
In this case, it could be put into law that those offering print services to someone are not liable for illegally printing copyright material so long as the person they are printing for signs to certify that they have the legal right to reproduce the materials.
I don't know what US lawmakers and courts are doing to combat lawsuits brought against people with only a small degree of actual responsibility, but this would make sense to me. Then again, introducing legal exemptions could just fill the law with contradictions and complications.
My thoughts exactly. I want to see the samll Japanese woman put on the suit and pick him up. Better yet, I want to see her pick up a car, or a 16 foot tall egg-laying alien queen.
As somebody pointed out above, you can make processors out of diamonds. Since these processors could take a ridiculous amount of heat the need for a heatsink would probably be gone.
Of course, some crazy video card manufacturer will probably make something with enough power going through it to melt everthing around the diamond and then you'll have a diamond processor with a diamond heatsink.
I was wondering which Canadian city they were using on Battlestar Galactica. My brother knew they were somewhere in Canada when he spotted the scotiabank logo on Cylon occupied Caprica.
That is a great business model for artists. It actually sounds a lot like Artistshare. Fans and fellow artists make both donations and artistic contributions to a musicians work as they are making it. The artists are paid and supported by their fans and fellow artists during the process of creating their work. Some here may remember the Slashdot article about Maria Schneider of Artistshare winning a Grammy for her jazz album.
I doubt any home security system can do this easily (although you could probably use some of them this way), but ideally, you should be able to add a temporary access code for your home alarm, give it to your plumber the day they plan to visit and tell them to let themselves in and out. They just wouldn't be able to lock or unlock the door, so you'd have to rely on the alarm to scare intruders off.
Better would be a system that also operated the front door lock with the access code. Then you would only have to trust the plumber to re-arm it when they left. You can make the door auto-lock once it's closed, so even if they don't re-arm the alarm for you, you can at least rest assured they aren't leaving your house open.
After their visit you remove the code from the system. Much safer than even temporarily handing out a key.
"Because I have a Mac, Xp, and Linux I love all Mozilla stuff because it runs on all those platforms almost exactly the same."
That's what I like about these apps too. They truly unbind us from the OS. This is good for Linux users who want decent apps without a crappy OS, and Windows users who can't abandon some of their software lock-ins regardless of how good they apps they could run under Linux are.
You know what else runs great on all platforms? GMail. It's the best mail app I've ever used. It's extremely light, and ultimately portable. I don't even have to install it on other machines, I just go to the page and my mail app is there. I no longer use Thunderbird, just Firefox.
Now all we need is a decent online calendar app to replace Sunbird and we're all set. Hotmail has one but, like the rest of Hotmail's web interface, it's too slow and cluttered to be useful. We need somebody to step up, make an open standard for calendars, and make a slick, useable web app for it.
Offices can use Microsoft Outlook (pretty useful design) by forcing everyone to install it, but an open calendar format would let friends and loose organizations use whatever calendar service / app they wanted and still work and interact with one another as easily as they email one another.
In the meantime, I'm off to get this new Sunbird release. It doesn't help me work with other people, but it at least helps me keep myself organized. I highly reccomend it to students. If you find yourself getting distracted or procrastiniating, get this app and make yourself a daily schedule.
For me, Spamgourmet.com is the solution to spam. I use this and I haven't seen a spam since I started. To make this a solution for all users, we need to integrate it into a slick web-based mail app like Gmail. Users would have to be taught to give out different mail aliases to everyone (ie..@spamgourmet.com) and to add everyone they like to their whitelist, but if the mail app could handle sending through the alias automatically, the user would have nothing else to think about.
It's the perfect solution. Users can post addresses publicly, and the addresses will expire once spammers start abusing them. Everyone already on the whitelist can continue sending as always. The only other kind of support needed would be a tiny javascript or server-side script to generate a unique one-message-only alias (ie. spamthis7692.[1].jmcclare@spamgourmet.com) that would be posted on major public sites for company representatives. They would still see spam from the constant address harvesting a major site goes through, but they would only see one spam per successful harvest, and everyone else would still get through.
Any large company could set this up. Yes, it's a little more trouble for the user than ideal spam free email use, but updating a whitelist and learning how to hand out aliases is less trouble than changing your email address every couple of months and dealing with increasing loads of spam in the meantime.
As for spy/ad-ware, there's some nasty stuff out there, but I agree that Firefox filters most of that out.
I agree. There is no such thing as a safe email address. As was pointed out in a post above, many email addresses are leaked to the wrong entities accidentally by purely innocent mistakes. You may think the address you only give to friends is safe, but eventually one of them will paste it into a list for an online greeting card or party invitation and your address will be in the wrong hands.
SpamGourmet.com is also the solution to this. You give disposable addresses to your friends and enter them as trusted senders. If they leak the disposable to the wrong people, you disable that address for anyone but your trusted senders, or just let it expire on it's own.
With SpamGourmet.com, the only spams you will see are the odd few that come through a compromised address before it expires, or (as the article points out) spams from those who dictionary attacked your mail provider to find your address. If you want to eliminate the dictionary attack problem, use a hard to guess account name as the article suggests. Nobody will have to remember it because they use SpamGourmet.com aliases to contact you. If by some chance your real mail address gets compromised, just switch to another one and have SpamGourmet.com forward to that instead.
To anyone who can be trained to use it, SpamGourmet is a perfect solution to spam. I use it and I no longer recieve any. To me, problems with spam are a thing of the internet past. I still see the occasional one, but so long as I don't publish my real address and keep my safe senders list updated, the people I want to hear from can reach me while the spammers cannot.
I think the ideal email application is one that uses the GMail web interface with SpamGourmet built in. Some of the things required to properly use a SpamGourmet account (keeping your whitelist updated, generating aliases to send mail through it) are a little tedious, but they could be made invisible if it were integrated into the mail app itself.
In the meantime, it's still better than dealing with spam. Anyone reading Slashdot should be using it.
Personally, I use spamgourmet.com for my multiple email addresses (most are disposables) and it forwards everything to my GMail account. The GMail web interface (as you guessed) is fine for me, so I'm completely covered. I can access my mail, my multiple accounts, and my mail app from any browser. To me, conventional mail apps are pointless.
I saw a story on the Discovery channel here in Canada about a European engineer who has designed a full sized car with the ability to run on a monorail track system much like the one you describe. His idea is that the track system could be setup as a mass transit system with stations and large bus like cars running on it, and then the off and on ramps for his combination road / rail cars could be built. Once the city drivers realize that they can pull out of their morning taffic jam and speed to work simply by buying a car built for the rails, they'll flock to the system.
The idea here is much like yours, except the cars are basically normal road vehicles; his prototype is made from a standard car. The rail system can't go everywhere, but it can certainly replace our highways where ill-adept human drivers create traffic waves and many deaths. Once on the rail, drivers would ride hands free until the system delivers them to their off ramp. Unlike autonomous road vehicles, rail vehicles are quite feasable to control and wouldn't require the driver to somehow stay alert for emergencies. The driver could talk on the phone or read until the car signals them that it will be bringing them to the offramp soon and they will have to take over again.
The big advantage to this guy's system (which he is already testing) is that the cars fit the model of what consumers expect in a road vehicle, but also work in a controlled mass transit system. Nearly the best of both worlds. Since you don't have to crowbar people out of their cars or even into a smaller car they won't like, this system stands a good chance of being adopted on a large scale.
Unfortunately, I couldn't find a link to any information about this invention, but I believe he had a contract to install his system in one city (possibly an Asian city?), so I'm hoping we'll start to hear more about it in the coming years. If we can't get people to drive cleaner, smaller vehicles, or leave their vehicles for mass transit, maybe we can get them to buy vehicles that work in a system that gets them to work faster.
Suit wearers are definitely one group keeping the temperature set low, but there is a larger factor at play.
I think the major reason offices are intentionally kept cold and drafty is that the vast majority of office workers drink coffee. I've worked in several different offices, some large, some small. I was always getting cold sitting still in my chair all day and ended up wearing several layers of clothing. I actually kept a sweater at the office because I didn't need it anywhere else. I eventually realised that one thing myself and all the other sweater wearers had in common was that we didn't drink coffee like the everybody else in the office.
The funniest moment after this realisation was watching three coffee drinkers ponder curiousely over our cold problem while sipping their drinks. "Maybe there's a draft over his desk?", "It could be that window he's next to...", "I bet he has bad circulation, old people get like that.", and so on. All the while sipping their fourth daily cup of a hot drink they new full well we stayed away from.
There may be other reasons, but if you see somebody at an office bundled up or just shivering in their seat, I'll bet you 2 to 1 odds they're one of the few who don't take the office drug regularily.
You're right. We'd like to disable the email address that the spammers have, but that means giving out a new email address to everyone we know. It also means (as he said) that we cannot post our address publicly because the spammers will quickly find it and we'll have to change it even sooner.
The solution to making this work is SpamGourmet. It's an email forwarding service. Basically, you don't give your real email address to anyone. When asked for an address you make one up for that person/organization and give them that instead. My addresses look like this: slashdotme.jmcclare@spamgourmet.com (jmcclare is my SpamGourmet username). Whenever you get an email from somebody you like, you add them to your whitelist. Spammers will only be able to send a specified number of emails to an address before it expires. You can set a default number, or put the number in the address, ie. slashdotme.[3].jmcclare@spamgourmet.com will accept three emails and then expire.
People on your whitelist can send you as many emails as they want. The only thing you have to do when an address (like a publicly posted one) gets taken in by spammers is post a new one. All of your whitelisted people can keep emailing you normally, new people will just have to get a new address from you or wherever you post your info. The old address will expire on it's own.
It's a little too complicated for the general populous to understand (although you could train a workplace to use this), but for me it's pretty much a cure for spam. Spammers can't reach me anymore. Anyone posting here should be able to use this, so I urge you to. Spam may still rule the internet around you, and your friends may keep losing your emails to their sloppy filters, but at least you won't get any crap in your own inbox.
Personally, I use Hotmail solely for disposable addresses because I have an app (GetMail) that can retrieve them and forward them on to my real account. I'm assuming this app and others like it use WebDAV, so now to use these throwaway addresses I will have to actually go to the sluggish Hotmail website and check each one of them manually.
I guess I'll have to start using Yahoo mail accounts now. I'd like to start using Spamgourmet, but their site is down today. Coincidence?
Slashdot Mirror
As much as I like how the game of Football plays, I will forever see it as one of the brain injury sports.
The Boston University School of Medicine studied 35 brains of former pro Football players. They found evidence of chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE) in 34 of them. The disease can lead to sufferers experiencing memory loss, dementia and depression.
It's fun to watch and play, but I can't support a sport that knowingly puts hundreds of thousands of kids through that. I don't know how much of this they knew when they published it, but the Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal comic about Headbrick was frighteningly accurate.
To make it safe, they would have to turn it into what we currently call “flag” or “touch” Football. It would be a different sport.
I think so too. The article from theatlantic also mentioned protecting proprietary technology.
Aside from handing over patents, I've read that it is routine for Chinese factories to secretly sell authentic brand products to counterfeiters. It's hard to compete with counterfeiters when they're selling the real thing at a discount.
This sounds like another case of The Insourcing Boom. Companies are finally seeing at the total cost of outsourcing. Cook mentioned that Apple already has to make some parts in the US and pay to ship them out to the manufacturing plants overseas, and that's only one of the common costs.
The interview doesn't go into a lot of details on Apple's move to US manufacturing, but a big part of the outsourcing cost is what you lose when you separate your product development from the manufacturing process. This comment from Tim Cook speaks to that:
I'm guessing this move to insource is not philanthropic, it's a smart business decision in the long run, just like General Electric's.
It says that XKCD passwords (at least 18 lower case characters) would take insane amounts of time to crack, but it doesn't give numbers for a rainbow table attack; that's where an attacker makes all combinations of 1 to 4 words from a list of common ones and tries those first. They would also try word separators like spaces, underscores, dashes and even odd symbols. Those don't add much to the total search space though.
A rainbow table attack would reduce XKCD passwords to about 2048^4 (most use 4 words from a list of 2048 common ones). That's a search space of 1.76×10^13. That would take about 54 centuries of online cracking, 30 minutes of offline cracking and 1.5 seconds of offline mega-cluster hacking. That's not so good.
If you stick a single symbol character into the middle of one of your words (@, #, %, &, etc.), the rainbow attack fails and the search space goes back up to 2.66 x 10^35, or 8.45 hundred billion centuries to crack offline with a mega-cluster. Effectively uncrackable.
Even three words with a random symbol would take 1.18 thousand centuries offline with a mega-cluster. I think I'll go with that from now on.
The Palladium RPG aims more for realism and combat simulation. It can get tedious, but it's pretty flexible in the amount of detail you can enforce.
They also have a lot of books that apply their system to completely different settings like modern day and sci-fi. Heroes Unlimited and Ninjas and Superspies work pretty well together.
This discussion thread is only for those of us who do not read the article. There will be another post later that actually links to the article to allow those annoying fact checkers to join in.
You can spin this story the other way. If the traditional media industry in the US managed to have a foreign company seized using current laws, they obviously have no need of new ones like SOPA and PIPA.
I found this site very helpful: http://www.dpreview.com/
Read just one of their reviews and you'll learn about all of the most important things to look for in a camera. Their camera database is amazing for narrowing down your options once you have an idea of your price range and what you want.
That seems to be the case and it seems rather innapropriate here. Perhaps rather than defining legal liabilities, lawmakers may have to start defining legal exemptions to keep frivolous litigations at bay.
In this case, it could be put into law that those offering print services to someone are not liable for illegally printing copyright material so long as the person they are printing for signs to certify that they have the legal right to reproduce the materials.
I don't know what US lawmakers and courts are doing to combat lawsuits brought against people with only a small degree of actual responsibility, but this would make sense to me. Then again, introducing legal exemptions could just fill the law with contradictions and complications.
My thoughts exactly. I want to see the samll Japanese woman put on the suit and pick him up. Better yet, I want to see her pick up a car, or a 16 foot tall egg-laying alien queen.
As somebody pointed out above, you can make processors out of diamonds. Since these processors could take a ridiculous amount of heat the need for a heatsink would probably be gone.
Of course, some crazy video card manufacturer will probably make something with enough power going through it to melt everthing around the diamond and then you'll have a diamond processor with a diamond heatsink.
Why did this never happen to R2-D2?
I was wondering which Canadian city they were using on Battlestar Galactica. My brother knew they were somewhere in Canada when he spotted the scotiabank logo on Cylon occupied Caprica.
That is a great business model for artists. It actually sounds a lot like Artistshare. Fans and fellow artists make both donations and artistic contributions to a musicians work as they are making it. The artists are paid and supported by their fans and fellow artists during the process of creating their work. Some here may remember the Slashdot article about Maria Schneider of Artistshare winning a Grammy for her jazz album.
I doubt any home security system can do this easily (although you could probably use some of them this way), but ideally, you should be able to add a temporary access code for your home alarm, give it to your plumber the day they plan to visit and tell them to let themselves in and out. They just wouldn't be able to lock or unlock the door, so you'd have to rely on the alarm to scare intruders off.
Better would be a system that also operated the front door lock with the access code. Then you would only have to trust the plumber to re-arm it when they left. You can make the door auto-lock once it's closed, so even if they don't re-arm the alarm for you, you can at least rest assured they aren't leaving your house open.
After their visit you remove the code from the system. Much safer than even temporarily handing out a key.
"Because I have a Mac, Xp, and Linux I love all Mozilla stuff because it runs on all those platforms almost exactly the same."
That's what I like about these apps too. They truly unbind us from the OS. This is good for Linux users who want decent apps without a crappy OS, and Windows users who can't abandon some of their software lock-ins regardless of how good they apps they could run under Linux are.
You know what else runs great on all platforms? GMail. It's the best mail app I've ever used. It's extremely light, and ultimately portable. I don't even have to install it on other machines, I just go to the page and my mail app is there. I no longer use Thunderbird, just Firefox.
Now all we need is a decent online calendar app to replace Sunbird and we're all set. Hotmail has one but, like the rest of Hotmail's web interface, it's too slow and cluttered to be useful. We need somebody to step up, make an open standard for calendars, and make a slick, useable web app for it.
Offices can use Microsoft Outlook (pretty useful design) by forcing everyone to install it, but an open calendar format would let friends and loose organizations use whatever calendar service / app they wanted and still work and interact with one another as easily as they email one another.
In the meantime, I'm off to get this new Sunbird release. It doesn't help me work with other people, but it at least helps me keep myself organized. I highly reccomend it to students. If you find yourself getting distracted or procrastiniating, get this app and make yourself a daily schedule.
For me, Spamgourmet.com is the solution to spam. I use this and I haven't seen a spam since I started. To make this a solution for all users, we need to integrate it into a slick web-based mail app like Gmail. Users would have to be taught to give out different mail aliases to everyone (ie. .@spamgourmet.com) and to add everyone they like to their whitelist, but if the mail app could handle sending through the alias automatically, the user would have nothing else to think about.
It's the perfect solution. Users can post addresses publicly, and the addresses will expire once spammers start abusing them. Everyone already on the whitelist can continue sending as always. The only other kind of support needed would be a tiny javascript or server-side script to generate a unique one-message-only alias (ie. spamthis7692.[1].jmcclare@spamgourmet.com) that would be posted on major public sites for company representatives. They would still see spam from the constant address harvesting a major site goes through, but they would only see one spam per successful harvest, and everyone else would still get through.
Any large company could set this up. Yes, it's a little more trouble for the user than ideal spam free email use, but updating a whitelist and learning how to hand out aliases is less trouble than changing your email address every couple of months and dealing with increasing loads of spam in the meantime.
As for spy/ad-ware, there's some nasty stuff out there, but I agree that Firefox filters most of that out.
I agree. There is no such thing as a safe email address. As was pointed out in a post above, many email addresses are leaked to the wrong entities accidentally by purely innocent mistakes. You may think the address you only give to friends is safe, but eventually one of them will paste it into a list for an online greeting card or party invitation and your address will be in the wrong hands.
SpamGourmet.com is also the solution to this. You give disposable addresses to your friends and enter them as trusted senders. If they leak the disposable to the wrong people, you disable that address for anyone but your trusted senders, or just let it expire on it's own.
With SpamGourmet.com, the only spams you will see are the odd few that come through a compromised address before it expires, or (as the article points out) spams from those who dictionary attacked your mail provider to find your address. If you want to eliminate the dictionary attack problem, use a hard to guess account name as the article suggests. Nobody will have to remember it because they use SpamGourmet.com aliases to contact you. If by some chance your real mail address gets compromised, just switch to another one and have SpamGourmet.com forward to that instead.
To anyone who can be trained to use it, SpamGourmet is a perfect solution to spam. I use it and I no longer recieve any. To me, problems with spam are a thing of the internet past. I still see the occasional one, but so long as I don't publish my real address and keep my safe senders list updated, the people I want to hear from can reach me while the spammers cannot.
I think the ideal email application is one that uses the GMail web interface with SpamGourmet built in. Some of the things required to properly use a SpamGourmet account (keeping your whitelist updated, generating aliases to send mail through it) are a little tedious, but they could be made invisible if it were integrated into the mail app itself.
In the meantime, it's still better than dealing with spam. Anyone reading Slashdot should be using it.
Personally, I use spamgourmet.com for my multiple email addresses (most are disposables) and it forwards everything to my GMail account. The GMail web interface (as you guessed) is fine for me, so I'm completely covered. I can access my mail, my multiple accounts, and my mail app from any browser. To me, conventional mail apps are pointless.
I don't know, but Marvin the paranoid android could have used one of these.
I saw a story on the Discovery channel here in Canada about a European engineer who has designed a full sized car with the ability to run on a monorail track system much like the one you describe. His idea is that the track system could be setup as a mass transit system with stations and large bus like cars running on it, and then the off and on ramps for his combination road / rail cars could be built. Once the city drivers realize that they can pull out of their morning taffic jam and speed to work simply by buying a car built for the rails, they'll flock to the system.
The idea here is much like yours, except the cars are basically normal road vehicles; his prototype is made from a standard car. The rail system can't go everywhere, but it can certainly replace our highways where ill-adept human drivers create traffic waves and many deaths. Once on the rail, drivers would ride hands free until the system delivers them to their off ramp. Unlike autonomous road vehicles, rail vehicles are quite feasable to control and wouldn't require the driver to somehow stay alert for emergencies. The driver could talk on the phone or read until the car signals them that it will be bringing them to the offramp soon and they will have to take over again.
The big advantage to this guy's system (which he is already testing) is that the cars fit the model of what consumers expect in a road vehicle, but also work in a controlled mass transit system. Nearly the best of both worlds. Since you don't have to crowbar people out of their cars or even into a smaller car they won't like, this system stands a good chance of being adopted on a large scale.
Unfortunately, I couldn't find a link to any information about this invention, but I believe he had a contract to install his system in one city (possibly an Asian city?), so I'm hoping we'll start to hear more about it in the coming years. If we can't get people to drive cleaner, smaller vehicles, or leave their vehicles for mass transit, maybe we can get them to buy vehicles that work in a system that gets them to work faster.
Suit wearers are definitely one group keeping the temperature set low, but there is a larger factor at play.
I think the major reason offices are intentionally kept cold and drafty is that the vast majority of office workers drink coffee. I've worked in several different offices, some large, some small. I was always getting cold sitting still in my chair all day and ended up wearing several layers of clothing. I actually kept a sweater at the office because I didn't need it anywhere else. I eventually realised that one thing myself and all the other sweater wearers had in common was that we didn't drink coffee like the everybody else in the office.
The funniest moment after this realisation was watching three coffee drinkers ponder curiousely over our cold problem while sipping their drinks. "Maybe there's a draft over his desk?", "It could be that window he's next to...", "I bet he has bad circulation, old people get like that.", and so on. All the while sipping their fourth daily cup of a hot drink they new full well we stayed away from.
There may be other reasons, but if you see somebody at an office bundled up or just shivering in their seat, I'll bet you 2 to 1 odds they're one of the few who don't take the office drug regularily.
You're right. We'd like to disable the email address that the spammers have, but that means giving out a new email address to everyone we know. It also means (as he said) that we cannot post our address publicly because the spammers will quickly find it and we'll have to change it even sooner.
The solution to making this work is SpamGourmet. It's an email forwarding service. Basically, you don't give your real email address to anyone. When asked for an address you make one up for that person/organization and give them that instead. My addresses look like this: slashdotme.jmcclare@spamgourmet.com (jmcclare is my SpamGourmet username). Whenever you get an email from somebody you like, you add them to your whitelist. Spammers will only be able to send a specified number of emails to an address before it expires. You can set a default number, or put the number in the address, ie. slashdotme.[3].jmcclare@spamgourmet.com will accept three emails and then expire.
People on your whitelist can send you as many emails as they want. The only thing you have to do when an address (like a publicly posted one) gets taken in by spammers is post a new one. All of your whitelisted people can keep emailing you normally, new people will just have to get a new address from you or wherever you post your info. The old address will expire on it's own.
It's a little too complicated for the general populous to understand (although you could train a workplace to use this), but for me it's pretty much a cure for spam. Spammers can't reach me anymore. Anyone posting here should be able to use this, so I urge you to. Spam may still rule the internet around you, and your friends may keep losing your emails to their sloppy filters, but at least you won't get any crap in your own inbox.
"A plan? Oh, I hate plans. That means we're gonna have to do stuff. Can't we just have a strategy or a mission statement?"
- Tucker, Red vs. Blue
Personally, I use Hotmail solely for disposable addresses because I have an app (GetMail) that can retrieve them and forward them on to my real account. I'm assuming this app and others like it use WebDAV, so now to use these throwaway addresses I will have to actually go to the sluggish Hotmail website and check each one of them manually.
I guess I'll have to start using Yahoo mail accounts now. I'd like to start using Spamgourmet, but their site is down today. Coincidence?