If I have a piece of glass and I put it in front of a copyrighted piece of work, are the glass manufacturers to be held responsible? The ISP is like the glass. How can an owner of network be held responsible for the traffic that others put on that network? If a drug runner runs drugs in a truck on the highway is the highway department responsible for providing the road?
If a terrorist smuggles a bomb onto an airplane, is the airline responsible? How about the airport? The government?
Sometimes the people who control the flow of things *are* responsible for what is actually flowing.
Whiplash (by EIDOS) is a recent 3-D platformer type game where you play a team of a weasel named "Spanx" and a rabbit named "Redmond" chained together, trying to escaping from a crazy genetic testing facility.
This game was hilarious, *very* well written, fun, and highly rated. It proves that scripted comedy works, if you have good writers and it's well executed.
You can't look at a crappy network sit-com and say "scripted comedy is dead". Look at something good.
the "guardians" are the ones making war. are you telling me that we need... the guardians... to protect us all from... the guardians?
if nobody had a military, nobody would need one. there is no causal relationship there... it's the same as nuclear proliferation. either we all have them, or we all don't, and there's no in-between.
I said that we need to be guardians because there are others who would seek their own advancement at great cost to us and other more helpless nations.
And if nobody had a military, yes, nobody would need one. UNTIL somebody created a military. Then we would need one. But then it would be too late. And "we" would be either dead or an oppressed, marginalized part of "them".
As far as nuclear proliferation, it's the same case. Ideally nobody has nuclear weapons. But once somebody has them, it's too late to counter that threat. Hence the letter from Einstein to President Roosevelt I mentioned in the previous post (i.e. I'm not such a big pacifist any more, and please build the nuke or Germany will first).
And in the present, in the real world, we'll continue to create contingency plans for when bad people do bad things.
Your idealism is sweet and refreshing. Your post will make a nice inscription on your tombstone shortly, should we put down our arms and just hope and pray for peace.
Let me preface this with the admission that the only thing I know about IF comes from playing Zork I when I was a kid (I remember moving a rug and killing a troll with a sword), and some semi-pornographic "seduce councellor Troi" (from Star Trek TNG) interactive text game as a teenager (I remember getting anal-lube from the bathroom cabinet).
So my question is: Why are there so many interpreters? The contest requires at least SIX different ones (from the competition site):
Most of the interpreters you will need are available from the IF
Archive. You will need interpreters for TADS
2 and 3,
Z-code,
Hugo,
ALAN,
and ADRIFT (for Windows or Mac).
You'd think that after so many years, there would be some standardization. Are these all viable platforms, and why?
First, I didn't call you "naive", but I'm sorry if you took offense at my statement anyway. Now let me respond to your counterpoints.
1. I never claimed that competition had to be violent. I agree that nonviolent competition is often more productive (i.e. largely a positive sum game rather than zero sum).
4. Your claim is comparable to saying that police officers are "clearly failing at their tasks" because there still exists crime. You have it backwards. The existence of crime/war CREATES the need for the guardians. It does not prove that they are failing whatsoever.
5. This (armed citizenry providing checks on centralized control) is a rathole of an argument to fall into, but I will make this simple analogy: Native people are less likely to take advantage of elephants and other dangerous animals for food because those prey are dangerous to them. Often mysticism, religion, and politics evolve up around this basic concept, but the reality is that the weak generally end up being taken advantage of in one way or another. This is not pessimistic, it is real. I am an optimist like you, but that means I am a pragmatist first, and push policy to create positive outcomes overall rather than advancing unstable facades of a utopia that requires constant propping up.
And Albert Einstein was a brilliant scientist, but he led a disasterous personal life, and his idealism forced him into many incorrect conclusions throughout his life, particularly exemplified by his wholesale renouncement of pacifism in the face of the horrible Nazi threat and writing of a famous letter in 1939 to President Roosevelt suggesting that the U.S.A. had better build an atomic bomb before the Germans or face defeat and destruction.
Of course after the war, he was free to return to his idealistic pacifism and encourage disarmament while there were no huge threats looming, but he also is famous for the recognition that bad people build bad weapons: "I know not with what weapons World War III will be fought, but World War IV will be fought with sticks and stones."
Your arguments echo the typical wishfulness of a naive pacifist.
Here's the simple reality:
Competition is a prime driving force that pushes evolution, including the social evolution that has led to our "civilized world" that you hold in such high regard.
You can't just shut off competition when you get to a point you're happy with. It will always exist on many scales.
There are those who would seek personal gain at the unequal and massive expense of others.
The guardians tasked with maintaining stability are responsible for preventing such "evil" forces from causing chaos. (This explains why nations need military force to defend themselves and others).
Checks and balances are important to prevent those guardians from becoming corrupt and self-serving. (This explains the "right to bear arms").
So if you have any criticisms of this unpleasant reality, then try to be specific about it, rather than just naively wishing for peace. And if you somewhat agree with what I said, but feel "why should we be the ones" (i.e. #4 is fine, but let somebody else do it), then consider the words of Rev. Martin Niemoller (1945):
First they came for the Communists,
and I didn't speak up,
because I wasn't a Communist.
Then they came for the Jews,
and I didn't speak up,
because I wasn't a Jew.
Then they came for the Catholics,
and I didn't speak up,
because I was a Protestant.
Then they came for me,
and by that time there was no one
left to speak up for me.
Sure, maybe. Or perhaps they have no idea what "malicious code" is in the first place. BTW: They shouldn't have to care about malicious code! It's like asking Joe-on-the-street what the US strategic and tactical strategies should be in the Middle East. What kind of background/training does Joe have? Why in the world would I give a crap about his answers on any polls.
A better analogy, instead of saying that average people need not know US "strategic and tactical strategies", is war-time rationing. You may not know how to build a tank, but if the government says "don't waste metal because we need a lot of it to build tanks" (as they have done in the past), then average person should listen.
And in this case, the government should step up and say "don't let your PC become a zombie, because you are contributing to massive DDOS attacks againt our critical infrastructure". Unfortunately, it takes an event of 9/11 proportions to wake people up enough to acknowledge the possibility.
So when NYSE, Nasdaq, banking networks, and critical communications infrastructure are brought down by a cyber-terrorist attack, THEN you'll start seeing this top-down focus on more localized security. Sadly, not before that.
The key here is that no data segments are executed, so NX protection wouldn't help.
It may not be the "end-all-be-all of buffer overflow prevention", but there are still a tremendous number of cases where it WOULD seem to help. Security is about eliminating vulnerabilities. Just because you can enter my house through the chimney doesn't mean that the deadbolt on my front door isn't helping secure my house.
I can imagine being forced to weight the "Tricon Global Food Corp Society" with a minimum of of 10% weight whenever I access information through the "free" WiFi network in my local Taco Bell!
That addresses the *access* side of such a global network (and it's a scary thought), but what about who actually owns the data? Preserving the network in a serverless P2P format could make it truly free AND *extremely* fault-tolerant.
In this way, various subgroups could actually charge for access to their SOCIETY subnet. Charging either money, or again, forced weighting. For example, to subscribe to the "KPWR R&B Music Appreciators" SOCIETY subnet (which would allow searches for "usher" to return the musician rather than the guy who finds your seat at a show), you might be required to accept a minimum weight of 5% in the "Seagram's Party People" (their sponsor) SOCIETY subnet. So now you can find "usher", but if you search for "mixed drink recipes", you'll get a lot of pages recommending Seagram's brand alcohol as a base for your drinks.
As long as this is *transparent* (i.e. I can see how my weights are being set and the dependencies, and I can remove ones I don't like), this doesn't strike me as that horrible.
Terms:
A "DOCUMENT" is a piece of information/site/etc.
A "SOCIETY" is an arbitrary groups of people and their DOCUMENTs
"QUALITY" is a value (computed similar to Google's PageRank) for a particular DOCUMENT, according to a particular SOCIETY.
"SEMANTIC NODES" link together to constitute a "SEMANTIC GRAPH", composing a global neural network of concepts. Each SOCIETY can emphsize and de-emphasize various features and connections of this GRAPH.
"SEMANTICS" are weighted (by the author) bindings between a DOCUMENT and a SEMANTIC NODE.
The key concepts that complete the picture are:
1. VALUE is contextually dependent on the SOCIETY(s) you are currently in. E.g. Doctors will emphasize medical aspects of breasts differently than pornographers.
2. SEMANTIC VALUE is a derivative property found by taking the full VALUE of a DOCUMENT and spreading it among all of its weighted SEMANTIC BINDINGS (that's the key right there that prevents authorial abuse/semantic SPAM).
And then that's it. It just works. I plug into some set of societies (again, weighted), and I inherit their combined SEMANTIC GRAPH and VALUE assessments of documents. Then each document has SEMANTIC VALUE relevant to me. And a big powerful search engine pulls it all together. Whoever builds that search engine will create and own the emergent global consciousness.
jhoger, why do you keep arguing your point? Your original post about "why get in the way of folks just trying to get their work done if the problem isn't really solved?" read like a sad emotional plea from a kid threatened with losing his play time. Eravau's analogy (parent post) of a door (=USB port) on a house (=computer/data) showed just how flawed your logic is, and I can't think of a better or more obvious counterexample than that one.
I've worked with guys like you before, and they were truly a menace to the welfare of the overall state of IT. The world is a bit more complex than you make it out to be. At the same time, if you understood some basic principles of security, you would realize that predicting and preventing specific attacks is the foundation of a good defense. The more you can prevent, the better defended you are.
So until there IS a more holistic way to protect data (e.g. hardware-implemented DRM, of which I'm sure the idea gives you nightmares), security will be done by making theft hardER for would-be thieves. And if that costs Samir-Nayeenanajar-random-programmer 10 minutes a month where he has to fill out a "backup authorization form" or some such nonsense, then that's the price you pay for knowing your data is (that much more) secure.
About three days ago, Yahoo! just deleted all of my mail older than 6/22 (years worth of mail), which coincides with about when I noticed the 2 GB changeover (yes I have Yahoo! Mail Plus). I have gotten no word from them about how or why this happened, and no idea if it will come back.
Has anybody else had this happen to them? If not, BACK UP your email before they decide to burn you too.
I *think* that they sped up and over-compressed the portions where the interviewer is speaking so that the whole file would be smaller and you could listen to the important parts quicker.
Either that, or he has serious case of chinnuts, if you know what i'm saying...
419 Victim Blacklist - PROTECTED FOR LIFE!
on
419 Scam Blow-by-Blow
·
· Score: 5, Funny
I have a SOLUTION for 419 victims. If you've been a victim of a 419 scam, you can sign up on my "419 Blacklist". The way it works is that all 419 scammers are required to check their victims against this list, and if they are on the list, THEY CANNOT BE SCAMMED!
This is like a "Do Not Scam" registry (like the FTC's "Do Not Call"). It REALLY WORKS!
All you need to do is send your Name, address, SSN, and the credit card numbers, bank account numbers, and PINs of any and all accounts you wish to protect. Just a single email, and you're PROTECTED FOR LIFE!
This service normally costs $100 initially plus $50 per account you wish to protect, but I am making it available to Slashdot members for a special rate. I will WAIVE THE $100 SIGNUP FEE! Just send the information and paypal the fee to me and you will be PROTECTED FOR LIFE!
How can you lose? See what other members are saying:
"I feel protected. FOR LIFE!" -- Jack Hortens, 2003 "Thanks for protecting me for life." -- Peter Luzzo, 2003 "I've never felt so protected, especially for life." -- Thomas Frank, 2004
I wouldn't advocate licking things while tripping on LSD. It might seem like a good idea at the time, but the next day you might wake up with the realization that fire doesn't taste as good as you thought it would.
Just wait for the DMCA-related exceptions to start rolling in, late 2005. Once **AA realizes people are setting up unregulated spontaneous exchanges of data, they start trying to find ways to restrict it. Of course, you can always help keep them at bay by supporting the EFF...
The final and main point the author makes in the article is to suggest that compilers start getting smarter and generate warnings for security problems (such as the "gets()" warnings put in many compilers not too long ago. But:
These tools have existed for years but are not popular. Why? Because they generate a lot of warnings, and, as countless software engineers have pointed out, it's time-consuming to sift through the spurious warnings looking for the ones that really matter. I've got news for them: there is no such thing as a warning that doesn't matter. That's why it warns you.
I can't agree more. Almost every large project I've worked on with multiple programmers has tons of warnings throughout development. I mean BOTH compiler warnings AND runtime warnings in the log files. Sometimes you can track one down and find out "I forgot to tell you that you need to change XXX in your config file", but most of the time you don't even see the new warnings amid a sea of "acceptable" ones, and the rest of the time, it's more of a "I don't know why that's happening, but it seems to work anyway" type of response.
If you see a warning, get rid of it right away! Once you slack off a bit, it becomes like dirty dishes piling up in the kitchen sink. Nobody wants to touch them, and everybody feels like most of them are the other roommate's anyway.
Why use external mail providers?
Step 1. Install sendmail & some spam filter ...
I suppose you have your own little organic garden in your yard from which you pluck all of your food? That would avoid problems with GMO food and pesticides on general produce.
Might as well keep a cow and chickens in the yard to have fresh milk (without antibiotics) and eggs.
While you're at it, why buy bottled water? Why even use tap water? Just set up a reservoir in your yard and capture rain water, then distill and purify it to drink.
Generate your own electricity. Build your computers out of wood. Process raw ore to get all the metals you use for parts. Blow your own glass. Sew your own clothes! Defend yourself in court! Perform surgery on your immediate family and deliver your own children! Make your own musical instruments! Do it all yourself!
Look, the point is this: It is a fair question to ask why somebody uses some particular service. But the way in which you are asking makes it seem like you just don't get why anybody would possibly not want to do it themselves. How many of the above things I mentioned do you actually do? Just as you would rather plug your computers into the electric grid than generate your own electricity, most people would rather spend their time doing things other than patching and maintaining mail servers (e.g. organic gardening, spending time with family, whatever), so they use existing mail providers.
Because it's "on demand", whereas on TV you have to wait for something to come on. Granted, having 12 HBOs and 7 Starzez makes it more likely that something you like will be on, but you still can't decide "I want to watch Ghostbusters right NOW" and hope that it will be on.
The simplest online database that could possibly work.
Wiki is a piece of server software that allows users to freely create and edit Web page content using any Web browser. Wiki supports hyperlinks and has a simple text syntax for creating new pages and crosslinks between internal pages on the fly.
Wiki is unusual among group communication mechanisms in that it allows the organization of contributions to be edited in addition to the content itself.
Like many simple concepts, "open editing" has some profound and subtle effects on Wiki usage. Allowing everyday users to create and edit any page in a Web site is exciting in that it encourages democratic use of the Web and promotes content composition by nontechnical users.
Historical Note. The first ever wiki site was created for the Portland Pattern Repository in 1995. That site now hosts tens of thousands of pages.
Slashdot Mirror
Sometimes the people who control the flow of things *are* responsible for what is actually flowing.
Whiplash (by EIDOS) is a recent 3-D platformer type game where you play a team of a weasel named "Spanx" and a rabbit named "Redmond" chained together, trying to escaping from a crazy genetic testing facility.
This game was hilarious, *very* well written, fun, and highly rated. It proves that scripted comedy works, if you have good writers and it's well executed.
You can't look at a crappy network sit-com and say "scripted comedy is dead". Look at something good.
And if nobody had a military, yes, nobody would need one. UNTIL somebody created a military. Then we would need one. But then it would be too late. And "we" would be either dead or an oppressed, marginalized part of "them".
As far as nuclear proliferation, it's the same case. Ideally nobody has nuclear weapons. But once somebody has them, it's too late to counter that threat. Hence the letter from Einstein to President Roosevelt I mentioned in the previous post (i.e. I'm not such a big pacifist any more, and please build the nuke or Germany will first).
And in the present, in the real world, we'll continue to create contingency plans for when bad people do bad things.
Your idealism is sweet and refreshing. Your post will make a nice inscription on your tombstone shortly, should we put down our arms and just hope and pray for peace.
So my question is: Why are there so many interpreters? The contest requires at least SIX different ones (from the competition site): You'd think that after so many years, there would be some standardization. Are these all viable platforms, and why?
First, I didn't call you "naive", but I'm sorry if you took offense at my statement anyway. Now let me respond to your counterpoints.
1. I never claimed that competition had to be violent. I agree that nonviolent competition is often more productive (i.e. largely a positive sum game rather than zero sum).
4. Your claim is comparable to saying that police officers are "clearly failing at their tasks" because there still exists crime. You have it backwards. The existence of crime/war CREATES the need for the guardians. It does not prove that they are failing whatsoever.
5. This (armed citizenry providing checks on centralized control) is a rathole of an argument to fall into, but I will make this simple analogy: Native people are less likely to take advantage of elephants and other dangerous animals for food because those prey are dangerous to them. Often mysticism, religion, and politics evolve up around this basic concept, but the reality is that the weak generally end up being taken advantage of in one way or another. This is not pessimistic, it is real. I am an optimist like you, but that means I am a pragmatist first, and push policy to create positive outcomes overall rather than advancing unstable facades of a utopia that requires constant propping up.
And Albert Einstein was a brilliant scientist, but he led a disasterous personal life, and his idealism forced him into many incorrect conclusions throughout his life, particularly exemplified by his wholesale renouncement of pacifism in the face of the horrible Nazi threat and writing of a famous letter in 1939 to President Roosevelt suggesting that the U.S.A. had better build an atomic bomb before the Germans or face defeat and destruction.
Of course after the war, he was free to return to his idealistic pacifism and encourage disarmament while there were no huge threats looming, but he also is famous for the recognition that bad people build bad weapons: "I know not with what weapons World War III will be fought, but World War IV will be fought with sticks and stones."
-
Competition is a prime driving force that pushes evolution, including the social evolution that has led to our "civilized world" that you hold in such high regard.
-
You can't just shut off competition when you get to a point you're happy with. It will always exist on many scales.
-
There are those who would seek personal gain at the unequal and massive expense of others.
-
The guardians tasked with maintaining stability are responsible for preventing such "evil" forces from causing chaos. (This explains why nations need military force to defend themselves and others).
-
Checks and balances are important to prevent those guardians from becoming corrupt and self-serving. (This explains the "right to bear arms").
So if you have any criticisms of this unpleasant reality, then try to be specific about it, rather than just naively wishing for peace. And if you somewhat agree with what I said, but feel "why should we be the ones" (i.e. #4 is fine, but let somebody else do it), then consider the words of Rev. Martin Niemoller (1945):And in this case, the government should step up and say "don't let your PC become a zombie, because you are contributing to massive DDOS attacks againt our critical infrastructure". Unfortunately, it takes an event of 9/11 proportions to wake people up enough to acknowledge the possibility.
So when NYSE, Nasdaq, banking networks, and critical communications infrastructure are brought down by a cyber-terrorist attack, THEN you'll start seeing this top-down focus on more localized security. Sadly, not before that.
I can imagine being forced to weight the "Tricon Global Food Corp Society" with a minimum of of 10% weight whenever I access information through the "free" WiFi network in my local Taco Bell!
That addresses the *access* side of such a global network (and it's a scary thought), but what about who actually owns the data? Preserving the network in a serverless P2P format could make it truly free AND *extremely* fault-tolerant.
In this way, various subgroups could actually charge for access to their SOCIETY subnet. Charging either money, or again, forced weighting. For example, to subscribe to the "KPWR R&B Music Appreciators" SOCIETY subnet (which would allow searches for "usher" to return the musician rather than the guy who finds your seat at a show), you might be required to accept a minimum weight of 5% in the "Seagram's Party People" (their sponsor) SOCIETY subnet. So now you can find "usher", but if you search for "mixed drink recipes", you'll get a lot of pages recommending Seagram's brand alcohol as a base for your drinks.
As long as this is *transparent* (i.e. I can see how my weights are being set and the dependencies, and I can remove ones I don't like), this doesn't strike me as that horrible.
Here's how to do it properly.
How to Build a Semantic Web
Terms:
A "DOCUMENT" is a piece of information/site/etc.
A "SOCIETY" is an arbitrary groups of people and their DOCUMENTs
"QUALITY" is a value (computed similar to Google's PageRank) for a particular DOCUMENT, according to a particular SOCIETY.
"SEMANTIC NODES" link together to constitute a "SEMANTIC GRAPH", composing a global neural network of concepts. Each SOCIETY can emphsize and de-emphasize various features and connections of this GRAPH.
"SEMANTICS" are weighted (by the author) bindings between a DOCUMENT and a SEMANTIC NODE.
The key concepts that complete the picture are:
1. VALUE is contextually dependent on the SOCIETY(s) you are currently in. E.g. Doctors will emphasize medical aspects of breasts differently than pornographers.
2. SEMANTIC VALUE is a derivative property found by taking the full VALUE of a DOCUMENT and spreading it among all of its weighted SEMANTIC BINDINGS (that's the key right there that prevents authorial abuse/semantic SPAM).
And then that's it. It just works. I plug into some set of societies (again, weighted), and I inherit their combined SEMANTIC GRAPH and VALUE assessments of documents. Then each document has SEMANTIC VALUE relevant to me. And a big powerful search engine pulls it all together. Whoever builds that search engine will create and own the emergent global consciousness.
jhoger, why do you keep arguing your point? Your original post about "why get in the way of folks just trying to get their work done if the problem isn't really solved?" read like a sad emotional plea from a kid threatened with losing his play time. Eravau's analogy (parent post) of a door (=USB port) on a house (=computer/data) showed just how flawed your logic is, and I can't think of a better or more obvious counterexample than that one.
I've worked with guys like you before, and they were truly a menace to the welfare of the overall state of IT. The world is a bit more complex than you make it out to be. At the same time, if you understood some basic principles of security, you would realize that predicting and preventing specific attacks is the foundation of a good defense. The more you can prevent, the better defended you are.
So until there IS a more holistic way to protect data (e.g. hardware-implemented DRM, of which I'm sure the idea gives you nightmares), security will be done by making theft hardER for would-be thieves. And if that costs Samir-Nayeenanajar-random-programmer 10 minutes a month where he has to fill out a "backup authorization form" or some such nonsense, then that's the price you pay for knowing your data is (that much more) secure.
About three days ago, Yahoo! just deleted all of my mail older than 6/22 (years worth of mail), which coincides with about when I noticed the 2 GB changeover (yes I have Yahoo! Mail Plus). I have gotten no word from them about how or why this happened, and no idea if it will come back.
Has anybody else had this happen to them? If not, BACK UP your email before they decide to burn you too.
I *think* that they sped up and over-compressed the portions where the interviewer is speaking so that the whole file would be smaller and you could listen to the important parts quicker.
Either that, or he has serious case of chinnuts, if you know what i'm saying...
I have a SOLUTION for 419 victims. If you've been a victim of a 419 scam, you can sign up on my "419 Blacklist". The way it works is that all 419 scammers are required to check their victims against this list, and if they are on the list, THEY CANNOT BE SCAMMED!
This is like a "Do Not Scam" registry (like the FTC's "Do Not Call"). It REALLY WORKS!
All you need to do is send your Name, address, SSN, and the credit card numbers, bank account numbers, and PINs of any and all accounts you wish to protect. Just a single email, and you're PROTECTED FOR LIFE!
This service normally costs $100 initially plus $50 per account you wish to protect, but I am making it available to Slashdot members for a special rate. I will WAIVE THE $100 SIGNUP FEE! Just send the information and paypal the fee to me and you will be PROTECTED FOR LIFE!
How can you lose? See what other members are saying:
"I feel protected. FOR LIFE!" -- Jack Hortens, 2003
"Thanks for protecting me for life." -- Peter Luzzo, 2003
"I've never felt so protected, especially for life." -- Thomas Frank, 2004
Sign up now.
I wouldn't advocate licking things while tripping on LSD. It might seem like a good idea at the time, but the next day you might wake up with the realization that fire doesn't taste as good as you thought it would.
Just wait for the DMCA-related exceptions to start rolling in, late 2005. Once **AA realizes people are setting up unregulated spontaneous exchanges of data, they start trying to find ways to restrict it. Of course, you can always help keep them at bay by supporting the EFF...
If you see a warning, get rid of it right away! Once you slack off a bit, it becomes like dirty dishes piling up in the kitchen sink. Nobody wants to touch them, and everybody feels like most of them are the other roommate's anyway.
Might as well keep a cow and chickens in the yard to have fresh milk (without antibiotics) and eggs.
While you're at it, why buy bottled water? Why even use tap water? Just set up a reservoir in your yard and capture rain water, then distill and purify it to drink.
Generate your own electricity. Build your computers out of wood. Process raw ore to get all the metals you use for parts. Blow your own glass. Sew your own clothes! Defend yourself in court! Perform surgery on your immediate family and deliver your own children! Make your own musical instruments! Do it all yourself!
Look, the point is this: It is a fair question to ask why somebody uses some particular service. But the way in which you are asking makes it seem like you just don't get why anybody would possibly not want to do it themselves. How many of the above things I mentioned do you actually do? Just as you would rather plug your computers into the electric grid than generate your own electricity, most people would rather spend their time doing things other than patching and maintaining mail servers (e.g. organic gardening, spending time with family, whatever), so they use existing mail providers.
Because it's "on demand", whereas on TV you have to wait for something to come on. Granted, having 12 HBOs and 7 Starzez makes it more likely that something you like will be on, but you still can't decide "I want to watch Ghostbusters right NOW" and hope that it will be on.
Israel is a sole rose bush in a field of weeds. We water it with the hope that some day we will have a field of flowers.
Mod parent down. Facts are incorrect and misleading.
The parent poster is a fghcvq shpxvat gebyy.
Of course it's real.. You can print it yourself and see!