I believe you that the other netbooks might be built to break fast (I have seen some that look pretty chintzy) but my asus feels like it was built to be a small, portable pc that could easily be thrown into a bag and tossed around without breaking apart.
I think the article and most of the comments are missing the main point that enforces the trinity...
The core piece that makes the trinity viable is the tank (or more, the fact that the tank concept is functional).
The entire trinity is allowed to function because one character can get the attention of all of the monsters (or hold the attention of one big monster), leaving the DPS and healer free to go about their ways. I used to play WoW so my experiance speaks mostly to that...a lot of encounters deal more with managing aggro than with the other elements of the fight (and WoW is set up to make this happen). For example, The priest may be able to heal the tank fast enough that he would never die and the DPS may be able to all out kill him with ease but some monsters have very strong attacks and get distracted easily so you focus on things like timing your heals/attacks with the tanks high aggro abilities and using less efficient spells that have a lower threat rating. All classes have abilities meant to play with aggro (often to no effect other than increasing or reducing aggro) and as long as you can keep the right balance, the mobs stay on the tank and the trinity functions.
If you want to break up the trinity, this is the cycle that must be broken...it can't be done with giving jack-of-all trades clsses--people will just min-max them into variations of the trinity. To get rid of the trinity, you need mobs and encounters that don't respect the trinity.
The trinity doesn't hold in most PvP combat because your opponents are smart. When a big warrior charges in, their gut reaction is to throw a couple of blows his way but they will soon realize that that robe-wearing, pale skinned and frail player standing behind him looks like a much easier target...especially if that player is keeping the warrior alive--you know you have to drop the healer no matter how much damage and high aggro abilities the warrior is doling out on you.
Obviously even with "smart" enemies, there will be preferred group compositions (look at WoW arenas) but there will be more variations and more experimentation when the majority of your party can't sit back in the safety created by tankable mobs.
It is expensive here...I had issues over the summer when I was planning to travel around europe with hostels that wanted a deposit by wire transfer. The wire transfer fee from any of my bank accounts was more than the amount of the deposit. I can freely move money between my own accounts with ACH transfers but if I want to provide someone elses account number, especially internationally, it will cost something like $39 a transaction.
I ended up having to call the place on skype and give them my credit card number (they wanted me to email it...)
Right, because forcing all laptop manufacturers to use the same size and shape battery is a great way to encourage innovative designs...at least I will be able to share batteries between my 15" desktop replacement, macbook air, and 9" netbook right?
Car batteries are much more akin to something like a usb port...they are a small, inconsequential part that could easily fit whatever standard was necessary...car batteries still come in different sizes (and lets face it, the connection method is a lot simpler than a laptop battery) and there are still cars with 6v electric systems on the road (hell, there are even cars with dual batteries these days). In a laptop, the battery is an absolutely vital component (you can't just crank your CPU to get it started) that takes up a large portion of the size and weight of the unit...
I see no need for government regulation...especially since he is talking about business class notebooks here. The majority of these systems are being bought in large orders by educated customers--if they find Sony's battery systems to be unreasonable, they can always move their purchases to a different vendor (like say, Lenovo) with more widely available affordable replacement batteries.
I ran a fake profile for the bean (the "Cloud Gate" sculpture in chicago) several years ago.
It was in a relationship, tagged in photos, and wished every one of its friends happy birtday...but it was still removed.
When I dug further into it, I was told that someone had reported the account as fake (considering the amount of fake accounts, I doubt they check unless someone reports it)...what party poopers.
Granted it isn't large enough that you would try setting some other full sized entertainment device (dvd player or such) on top of it but....damn guys, you couldn't even set your remote control on top of that thing
I am surprised nobody has mentioned yet how much backing slashdot's community gave this project back when it was some guy's school project named "audioscrobbler"
I was interested to find out a couple of years ago that I had a current and active last.fm account. Turns out that my original audioscrobbler plugin on one of my computers was still alive and kicking and sent updates to the same servers (prefs/plugin were in App Data or something and got copied over with every reformat)
I always had more respect for her than other pop artists because I knew she wrote most of her own stuff (despite the fact that there was so much obvious auto-tune use)
Since I have seen more examples of her signing without autotune in other videos and signing without autotune WHILE playing piano in the linked video, I have even more respect. Sure she does some crazy shit for attention but I bet she is making a killing doing so and will have no problem dropping into some more respectable "professional" musician roles (use her given name to get rid of the "lady gaga" factor) when her act starts to lose its draw.
That is because as far as I know, espionage, trickery, and outright theft are perfectly acceptable in EVE (of course so is murdering you to get back at you for it).
From other posters it sounds like the ban was for trading the money out for real money which most developers frown upon.
Please find me a lawyer with fees that are less than the $12 in question and who I would have to spend less time meeting with to explain my case than I would spend handling it myself.
I feel like that takes a lot more work (such as changing all other subscriptions that are tied to it).
Also, be aware that just because they can't charge you does not mean that they can't claim you owe them money. I had debt collectors sent after me for a similar situation. Someone signed me up for a trial (they had a "free" newspaper subscription that I might like and didn't realize it would need to be cancelled) and I just ignored all the mail from the company that came after the trial ended. The mail looked like those fake bills that magazines and newspapers use to make you renew (they usually look exactly like a bill except for "this is not a bill" printed on it somewhere) so I ignored them. Eventually I had the debt collectors chasing after me, sending letters, getting my real phone number by calling my friends, etc. Total charge was about $12...worst part was the original company admitted within seconds of me first calling that I clearly shouldn't owe anything and it still took a LONG time to get everything cleared up and stop the debt collectors.
Faxing in your cancellation takes about a minute, doesn't require you to change your CC number, and ensures that you won't have crazy debt collectors on your ass
I have written in it...obviously not the new release but some sort of earlier version.
It is a joke...its code runs so slow. I was happy not to be using VB but soon realized that VB is at least reasonably quick. It makes sense that the creators don't use it...anyone capable of creating a language is perfectly capable of writing in a better language.
It could be good for gui prototyping...it made very fast gui interfaces that were fully interactive and you could actually extend it pretty far. It just ran so slow that I can't see any benefit for using it in a professional environment. The extra time your users will have to spend waiting on the program would far outweigh the time/money it would take to hire someone to do it right (or even VB-right)
and half the advertising on facebook is really there just to give small payouts to the app developers to keep them making new facebook apps.
It is much easier to make money (at least to cover costs) from a facebook game where you run a restaurant than a flash game on runyourownrestaurant.com. The players are already there and the advertising infrastructure is already in place to give decent payouts.
Facebook's real income must come not from adsense style pay per click style ads but rather from having exquisite demographic data about every single customer which they can sell or package with a full on ad-campaign (something payed for at least partially in advance, not per click).
I think other cell phone manufacturers could learn from this. Give your customers a very easy integrated experience for buying, installing, and syncing applications, music and video, and keeping all of it up to date.
Umm...every crappy verizon phone I have seen in the last 6 years has had this functionality. They replace the manufacturer interface with their own, disable all of the features, and then sell you back functions along with ringtones and games. You just click on them in some interface and the price gets tacked onto your bill, much to the chagrin of many parents (at least the app store doesn't regularly charge $5.99 for a game).
Other providers have had similar functions for quite a while (although usually through a browser app since they do not replace the OS with a bunch of tied together "pay more money" junk like verizon does).
I have never used their full disk encryption or hidden partition (2 different passwords that unlock different stuff) setups but it seems to work pretty well for making a single container file that is encrypted and can then be mounted as a disk. Cross platform too...I even got it to work across the network with SMB shares
I think the problem we are all running into is that your experience was great. Bill Gates dropped out too and he did great.
That does not mean that the good advice is that everyone should drop out. You want everyone to prove that calculus can make you a better programmer but I don't see you presenting any proof that not requiring calculus is going to make better programmers. Maybe this is your lack of math classes talking, but a simple example of your success does not prove anything...its just an anecdote.
I will say this though...it sounds like you are a pretty good programmer and you were required to take calculus for a CS degree. Maybe you didn't actually pass it or get the degree, but you were still required to take it so what I am seeing here is this: A skilled programmer who was required to take calculus ---thats you
What he is describing isn't like frat cheat libraries and it sounds about right. Its not malicious...you have a friend taking a class you took last year and you tell them "ooh he likes to test you on this theorem" or they ask you for help figuring something out and you remember that the trick is to solve for K and plug it back in.
Maybe you give someone your old exam. If the professors return them, I see no reason why this is a problem. Professors should be writing new exams (and the solutions are often so process driven that unless you copy, you can't really cheat) and most of them choose to give out their old exams as study guides instead of writing up some other document. I had friends who got an old test before the exam early in their college careers--the tests ended up being almost identical and they felt bad enough to go to the professor and offer to retake a new test. He told them that it was fine and that it was smart of them to get the test ahead of time since even if he had had time to make bigger changes to the exam, the way most of those classes were set up meant that there were a handful of theorems that basically had to appear in a problem on the midterm (you know that if you spent one week learning Process X, there would be at least one problem where you had to use Process X).
There was certainly cheating (and yes, a lot of it in the fraternities) that took the form of someone taking the test early and stealing a copy of the problems (either taking it with another section of the same teacher or claiming that they were graduating that quarter in order to take it before finals week). This isn't what the GP was talking about though...He is talking about a system that requires help from your peers (or peers+1 year)which is actually a lot like what it looks like in many industries when you get out of school...1st year analysts/associates/whatever looking to those who were recently in the same position for advice on how to do the work.
Were you able to take the CS classes that taught coding without the calc requirement? I was able to take all of the classes that actually taught programming without going very deep into the CS major (I took multi and linear algebra but I am not sure they were required for any of the CS classes I actually took)? My school was pretty big on not being pre-professional...if you wanted to be a programmer but didn't care for the math theory part of CS, they wanted you to get the skills needed but major in something that interested you.
As to #1, true, they are both coders but the second one is akin to hiring someone with an Econ BA over someone with an undergrad business degree (which are mostly watered down econ degrees...easing up the math/CS requirements and throwing in some extra business electives). By hiring the Econ guy, you may never need them to take a Lagrangian but you can be pretty sure they know or can easily pick up anything the business guy knows. They would be better for a "big picture" role with a little wider skillset while the business guy is more like the blue collar coder--best at being a specific duty cog in a big machine.
For #2, I mentioned in another post that when it comes to actual calculus (the stuff covered in calc I and II) the answer is almost never. I do however have to use abstractions of calculus and I am expected to know *why* they work even though I would have to check the wikipedia page to do anything more than a basic derivative by hand. I have to be responsible for the integrity and soundness of my methods--just like I am sure you would never submit code that only worked right due to some nonstandard behavior if you couldn't be sure that that code was going to produce the correct result 100% of the time.
You must have had some awful calculus professors (and how do you have so many professors and still not pass it?) if they couldn't give you practical examples of its use. I feel like every calculus textbook I have used was so filled with "practical" examples that sometimes it would have just been nice to be given a problem to just do.
It sounds like your problem is that you think you want a computer science degree. You are obviously not qualified. If I wanted to hire a computer scientist, I would not hire you. Luckily, most people are looking to hire programmers and it sounds like you are an excellent programmer. One of the responsibilities of a university that grants CS degrees, is to make sure that their CS graduates are equipped to move into a graduate CS program (whether or not they have the grades and other qualifications to get accepted to a grad program) and there is NO WAY you would make it through any respected CS masters or phd program without calculus.
So please, keep on coding but remember that you have brought up what is part of the fundamental question the submitter is really asking. The "blue collar" coders they were trying to describe are people like you--those with coding training but without the well rounded education granted with a BA. The "white collar" coders they are attempting to describe are the people with some extra training in less related and less job specific areas...they are the people who I could put on a project requiring a little calculus or something else knowing that they could relearn it with 10 minutes and a wikipedia page and then get on with the project.
Exactly. I went through the intro CS sequence at my school (majored in econ)
We used svn...we didn't have a class on it though. Somewhere in the computer systems class it showed up though and we started using it. The first time it showed up, there was a little info on how to use it but otherwise it was a lot like matlab or stata in an econ class..."here is a a tool, it sort of works like this, now use it to do this...ask for/seek help if you need it"
As for requiring calculus for CS...absolutely. CS is not a professional degree...it is a research oriented field of science and as a form of applied math, you won't get far without calculus. Sure, you can learn to write code...but we were only taught *languages* in the first two quarters of the intro CS sequence...third quarter was computer systems where I suppose we were taught a little assembly but otherwise simply expected to know enough C to complete the projects. Fourth quarter was basically a math class and then the upper level classes varied by topic but nothing (except databases) went back to the level of teaching you a language. Calculus was required pretty much across the board (once again excepting databases) after the first 3 introductory quarters. When you get to graduate level, trying to get by without calculus would be a joke...so many things have a foundation in calculus that it becomes absolutely required base knowledge.
To take an example from econ...I can't remember the last time I actually took a derivative or calculated an integral--especially not in a job situation--but many things that I do rely on those two simple functions and I am expected to know WHY they work. Just like you wouldn't put strange working code into production if you didn't know WHY it was working--maybe it works in your test cases but you can't be sure it will apply across the board without vulnerability.
This is difficult to do. I don't need to run a login server that is open to the public but I do need access that is open to me. I do this to account for unexpected situations.
By virtue of the unexpected nature, white listing is not a valid option in these situations. If I am somewhere and discover that I need access to my computer for some reason, I will not know in advance what IP I will be connecting from.
they have just realized that people are too lazy/stupid to type urls anymore. I know a lot of people who google youtube to get to youtube where they then search for a video (this one is especially stupid since you could probably just search your video on google and it would link you to youtube or you could type in youtube.com instead of google...)
When these users get their page of results, they want to then click on the link to barnesandnoble.com since they aren't looking for the BN company. Users are stupid...bn.com is great for email addresses but not so good for name recognition on a list.
Slashdot Mirror
I believe you that the other netbooks might be built to break fast (I have seen some that look pretty chintzy) but my asus feels like it was built to be a small, portable pc that could easily be thrown into a bag and tossed around without breaking apart.
The core piece that makes the trinity viable is the tank (or more, the fact that the tank concept is functional).
The entire trinity is allowed to function because one character can get the attention of all of the monsters (or hold the attention of one big monster), leaving the DPS and healer free to go about their ways. I used to play WoW so my experiance speaks mostly to that...a lot of encounters deal more with managing aggro than with the other elements of the fight (and WoW is set up to make this happen). For example, The priest may be able to heal the tank fast enough that he would never die and the DPS may be able to all out kill him with ease but some monsters have very strong attacks and get distracted easily so you focus on things like timing your heals/attacks with the tanks high aggro abilities and using less efficient spells that have a lower threat rating. All classes have abilities meant to play with aggro (often to no effect other than increasing or reducing aggro) and as long as you can keep the right balance, the mobs stay on the tank and the trinity functions.
If you want to break up the trinity, this is the cycle that must be broken...it can't be done with giving jack-of-all trades clsses--people will just min-max them into variations of the trinity. To get rid of the trinity, you need mobs and encounters that don't respect the trinity.
The trinity doesn't hold in most PvP combat because your opponents are smart. When a big warrior charges in, their gut reaction is to throw a couple of blows his way but they will soon realize that that robe-wearing, pale skinned and frail player standing behind him looks like a much easier target...especially if that player is keeping the warrior alive--you know you have to drop the healer no matter how much damage and high aggro abilities the warrior is doling out on you.
Obviously even with "smart" enemies, there will be preferred group compositions (look at WoW arenas) but there will be more variations and more experimentation when the majority of your party can't sit back in the safety created by tankable mobs.
Films don't do NTSC....films are even worse....I hate the flicker when film projects bright white scenes...that is gone with digital.
I ended up having to call the place on skype and give them my credit card number (they wanted me to email it...)
Car batteries are much more akin to something like a usb port...they are a small, inconsequential part that could easily fit whatever standard was necessary...car batteries still come in different sizes (and lets face it, the connection method is a lot simpler than a laptop battery) and there are still cars with 6v electric systems on the road (hell, there are even cars with dual batteries these days). In a laptop, the battery is an absolutely vital component (you can't just crank your CPU to get it started) that takes up a large portion of the size and weight of the unit...
I see no need for government regulation...especially since he is talking about business class notebooks here. The majority of these systems are being bought in large orders by educated customers--if they find Sony's battery systems to be unreasonable, they can always move their purchases to a different vendor (like say, Lenovo) with more widely available affordable replacement batteries.
It was in a relationship, tagged in photos, and wished every one of its friends happy birtday...but it was still removed.
When I dug further into it, I was told that someone had reported the account as fake (considering the amount of fake accounts, I doubt they check unless someone reports it)...what party poopers.
Granted it isn't large enough that you would try setting some other full sized entertainment device (dvd player or such) on top of it but....damn guys, you couldn't even set your remote control on top of that thing
I was interested to find out a couple of years ago that I had a current and active last.fm account. Turns out that my original audioscrobbler plugin on one of my computers was still alive and kicking and sent updates to the same servers (prefs/plugin were in App Data or something and got copied over with every reformat)
Since I have seen more examples of her signing without autotune in other videos and signing without autotune WHILE playing piano in the linked video, I have even more respect. Sure she does some crazy shit for attention but I bet she is making a killing doing so and will have no problem dropping into some more respectable "professional" musician roles (use her given name to get rid of the "lady gaga" factor) when her act starts to lose its draw.
From other posters it sounds like the ban was for trading the money out for real money which most developers frown upon.
Please find me a lawyer with fees that are less than the $12 in question and who I would have to spend less time meeting with to explain my case than I would spend handling it myself.
Also, be aware that just because they can't charge you does not mean that they can't claim you owe them money. I had debt collectors sent after me for a similar situation. Someone signed me up for a trial (they had a "free" newspaper subscription that I might like and didn't realize it would need to be cancelled) and I just ignored all the mail from the company that came after the trial ended. The mail looked like those fake bills that magazines and newspapers use to make you renew (they usually look exactly like a bill except for "this is not a bill" printed on it somewhere) so I ignored them. Eventually I had the debt collectors chasing after me, sending letters, getting my real phone number by calling my friends, etc. Total charge was about $12...worst part was the original company admitted within seconds of me first calling that I clearly shouldn't owe anything and it still took a LONG time to get everything cleared up and stop the debt collectors.
Faxing in your cancellation takes about a minute, doesn't require you to change your CC number, and ensures that you won't have crazy debt collectors on your ass
Secret solution: fax in your cancellation
It is a joke...its code runs so slow. I was happy not to be using VB but soon realized that VB is at least reasonably quick. It makes sense that the creators don't use it...anyone capable of creating a language is perfectly capable of writing in a better language.
It could be good for gui prototyping...it made very fast gui interfaces that were fully interactive and you could actually extend it pretty far. It just ran so slow that I can't see any benefit for using it in a professional environment. The extra time your users will have to spend waiting on the program would far outweigh the time/money it would take to hire someone to do it right (or even VB-right)
It is much easier to make money (at least to cover costs) from a facebook game where you run a restaurant than a flash game on runyourownrestaurant.com. The players are already there and the advertising infrastructure is already in place to give decent payouts.
Facebook's real income must come not from adsense style pay per click style ads but rather from having exquisite demographic data about every single customer which they can sell or package with a full on ad-campaign (something payed for at least partially in advance, not per click).
I think other cell phone manufacturers could learn from this. Give your customers a very easy integrated experience for buying, installing, and syncing applications, music and video, and keeping all of it up to date.
Umm...every crappy verizon phone I have seen in the last 6 years has had this functionality. They replace the manufacturer interface with their own, disable all of the features, and then sell you back functions along with ringtones and games. You just click on them in some interface and the price gets tacked onto your bill, much to the chagrin of many parents (at least the app store doesn't regularly charge $5.99 for a game).
Other providers have had similar functions for quite a while (although usually through a browser app since they do not replace the OS with a bunch of tied together "pay more money" junk like verizon does).
I have never used their full disk encryption or hidden partition (2 different passwords that unlock different stuff) setups but it seems to work pretty well for making a single container file that is encrypted and can then be mounted as a disk. Cross platform too...I even got it to work across the network with SMB shares
That does not mean that the good advice is that everyone should drop out. You want everyone to prove that calculus can make you a better programmer but I don't see you presenting any proof that not requiring calculus is going to make better programmers. Maybe this is your lack of math classes talking, but a simple example of your success does not prove anything...its just an anecdote.
I will say this though...it sounds like you are a pretty good programmer and you were required to take calculus for a CS degree. Maybe you didn't actually pass it or get the degree, but you were still required to take it so what I am seeing here is this: A skilled programmer who was required to take calculus ---thats you
Maybe you give someone your old exam. If the professors return them, I see no reason why this is a problem. Professors should be writing new exams (and the solutions are often so process driven that unless you copy, you can't really cheat) and most of them choose to give out their old exams as study guides instead of writing up some other document. I had friends who got an old test before the exam early in their college careers--the tests ended up being almost identical and they felt bad enough to go to the professor and offer to retake a new test. He told them that it was fine and that it was smart of them to get the test ahead of time since even if he had had time to make bigger changes to the exam, the way most of those classes were set up meant that there were a handful of theorems that basically had to appear in a problem on the midterm (you know that if you spent one week learning Process X, there would be at least one problem where you had to use Process X).
There was certainly cheating (and yes, a lot of it in the fraternities) that took the form of someone taking the test early and stealing a copy of the problems (either taking it with another section of the same teacher or claiming that they were graduating that quarter in order to take it before finals week). This isn't what the GP was talking about though...He is talking about a system that requires help from your peers (or peers+1 year)which is actually a lot like what it looks like in many industries when you get out of school...1st year analysts/associates/whatever looking to those who were recently in the same position for advice on how to do the work.
As to #1, true, they are both coders but the second one is akin to hiring someone with an Econ BA over someone with an undergrad business degree (which are mostly watered down econ degrees...easing up the math/CS requirements and throwing in some extra business electives). By hiring the Econ guy, you may never need them to take a Lagrangian but you can be pretty sure they know or can easily pick up anything the business guy knows. They would be better for a "big picture" role with a little wider skillset while the business guy is more like the blue collar coder--best at being a specific duty cog in a big machine.
For #2, I mentioned in another post that when it comes to actual calculus (the stuff covered in calc I and II) the answer is almost never. I do however have to use abstractions of calculus and I am expected to know *why* they work even though I would have to check the wikipedia page to do anything more than a basic derivative by hand. I have to be responsible for the integrity and soundness of my methods--just like I am sure you would never submit code that only worked right due to some nonstandard behavior if you couldn't be sure that that code was going to produce the correct result 100% of the time.
It sounds like your problem is that you think you want a computer science degree. You are obviously not qualified. If I wanted to hire a computer scientist, I would not hire you. Luckily, most people are looking to hire programmers and it sounds like you are an excellent programmer. One of the responsibilities of a university that grants CS degrees, is to make sure that their CS graduates are equipped to move into a graduate CS program (whether or not they have the grades and other qualifications to get accepted to a grad program) and there is NO WAY you would make it through any respected CS masters or phd program without calculus.
So please, keep on coding but remember that you have brought up what is part of the fundamental question the submitter is really asking. The "blue collar" coders they were trying to describe are people like you--those with coding training but without the well rounded education granted with a BA. The "white collar" coders they are attempting to describe are the people with some extra training in less related and less job specific areas...they are the people who I could put on a project requiring a little calculus or something else knowing that they could relearn it with 10 minutes and a wikipedia page and then get on with the project.
We used svn...we didn't have a class on it though. Somewhere in the computer systems class it showed up though and we started using it. The first time it showed up, there was a little info on how to use it but otherwise it was a lot like matlab or stata in an econ class..."here is a a tool, it sort of works like this, now use it to do this...ask for/seek help if you need it"
As for requiring calculus for CS...absolutely. CS is not a professional degree...it is a research oriented field of science and as a form of applied math, you won't get far without calculus. Sure, you can learn to write code...but we were only taught *languages* in the first two quarters of the intro CS sequence...third quarter was computer systems where I suppose we were taught a little assembly but otherwise simply expected to know enough C to complete the projects. Fourth quarter was basically a math class and then the upper level classes varied by topic but nothing (except databases) went back to the level of teaching you a language. Calculus was required pretty much across the board (once again excepting databases) after the first 3 introductory quarters. When you get to graduate level, trying to get by without calculus would be a joke...so many things have a foundation in calculus that it becomes absolutely required base knowledge.
To take an example from econ...I can't remember the last time I actually took a derivative or calculated an integral--especially not in a job situation--but many things that I do rely on those two simple functions and I am expected to know WHY they work. Just like you wouldn't put strange working code into production if you didn't know WHY it was working--maybe it works in your test cases but you can't be sure it will apply across the board without vulnerability.
By virtue of the unexpected nature, white listing is not a valid option in these situations. If I am somewhere and discover that I need access to my computer for some reason, I will not know in advance what IP I will be connecting from.
When these users get their page of results, they want to then click on the link to barnesandnoble.com since they aren't looking for the BN company. Users are stupid...bn.com is great for email addresses but not so good for name recognition on a list.
drug dealers are probably pretty high use...I would imagine they like the anonymous prepaid phone