To be fair, the BBC are catering to a society who've been happily accepting dumbed-down and biassed TV, Newspapers etc. UK citizens have released their grip on what's important.
Proof positive:
1) more people vote for reality-TV shows like Big Brother than for real-life elections for councils an governments.
2) there was more publicity given to the anti fox-hunting bill than the Civil Contingencies Bill, which was perhaps the most important piece of legislation for 50 years, allowing the gov't to suspend any law and impose martial law merely by insinuating there is a threat.
this is why you should always get a detailed list of the projects on which a consultant/contractor has worked prior to buying services.
if the person has had few or no renewals, then chances are they're one of those consultant/contractor people who are very good at interviews but useless when it actually comes down to doing work.
I've been at a number of companies who've brought in people who've shined at interviews, and its only five weeks in you realise they've not accomplished anything! Naturally, their 3 month contract doesn't get renewes.
I recently changed employer and one of those supposed experts was to my knowledge unemployed but still claiming my former employer as their active client - trying to disguise their history.
So, as well as a detailed list, always check references, or only hire people on recommendation.
There's only been one unhacked secure video delivery system, and that's the tightly controlled closed proprietary system from NDS called Videoguard, used first by Sky satellite TV in the UK, and is now being adopted across Europe.
It depends on several things:
Firstly, proprietary hardware; they don't use a standard conditional access module (CI-CAM), but the decryption hardware is deeply embedded in the receiver
Secondly, non-standard crypto systems; they don't use or share the crypto algorithms with others; and it's possible to change the algorithm over time to ensure they're a moving target - made possible by proprietary hardware
Finally, a very active private security team who read bulletin boards, blogs, news sites etc; apparently they visit people who get too "interested". Hello NDS people!
It's strongly rumoured that NDS's researchers looked very closely at their rivals' systems to learn how they worked, and on discovering weaknesses posted hacks, so that they discredited the opposition and thus drove revenue their way. More interesting, Sky and their associates have flouted European Commission regulations on open and fair access to their technologies where they have a monopoly.
And for the final irony? The software system driving the set top boxes and the interactive content is called OpenTV, when it is not open at all, and they adapted GNU tools to compile the code and yet didn't contribute those tools back under the GPL until they were forced to!
yeah, but surely any serious geek would find it easier to use his/her home theatre PC running mythtv to down-convert from HDTV source to xvid at 640x480 before loading onto the zaurus?
you can buy a sharp zaurus with far better screen and a handfull of high capacity compact flash or SD cards for this kind of money and get a much more interesting device which would only be half toy. The battery life won't be as good though.
IMHO, these mmedia portables are really just overblown mp3 players, you've had to be pretty desperate to watch whole movies on such a tiny screen (I guess regular long distance flyers might disagree, but then you're crazy anyway!)
A brand new zaurus 6000L go for less than US$500 on ebay now.. the SL-C3000 with the internal hard drive is pretty much the same price and has so much to offer.
The best space industry has been the USA's. The reason why the ex-Soviet space industry appears to have such a good record is that they only every let people know about the successes - there were many disasters and deaths on the launch pad that were never reported - same as China's.
The best camera companys were in fact Hasselblad, Carl Zeiss, Minox and others. However, the Japanese largely destroyed them. I don't think the US ever had a major camera industry?
The best politicians are American made (and paid for by american businesses!) - Land of the free (if you're a rich tycoon)
The best lawyers are American made (and now funded by the best government money has bought) - Land of the litigated.
The best junk food is American made (all the other food is derivative of foreign food recreated by immigrants).
Here's a few smiley's in case you need them to make this more palatable::-):-)
people losing their groves is a common problem, deforestation is happening all over the world and its a major ecological catastrophe!
<FX: SLAP>
Oh, your groove! Are you an emporer and have gotten a new groove?
Re:Don't manually check slashdot - use RSS client!
on
Life Interrupted
·
· Score: 1
I should have put a smiley in there as my answer was slightly tongue in cheek.
Here's a smiley I made earlier:-)
Don't manually check slashdot - use RSS client!
on
Life Interrupted
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
why check slashdot every minute?
an RSS feed will do the job nicely; you're using firefox* of course?!
at the slashdot home page, just click on the orange rectangle on the bottom status bar and add the RSS feed to your bookmarks toolbar folder.
*thunderbird also supports RSS, but I'm not impressed with it too much. Opera's RSS client is also quite reasonable. If someone knows of a *free* RSS client for Palm, I'd be grateful to know, I haven't found one yet.
fasttrack visas in the UK make the H1 scheme in the US seem like an insurmountable obstacle. Despite the incredible rise in IT unemployment in the late 1990's and early 2000's, the UK government continued a plan to allow immigrants to go through a fast-track visa system and get work permits very very quickly.
The interesting thing is that the whole fast-track visa system was promoted heavily to the gov't by some of the biggest IT and management consultancies, who... can you see it coming?... yes, hired loads of cheap immigrant programmers/managers but continued to charge huge rates for their work, thus causing layoffs or depressed salaries for British workers, and giving themselves even greater profits!
So, you in the US have a lot to learn about governmental corruption, we in the UK are more inventive at it.
Why don't we consider the complete opposite: make it illegal to buy from spammers - kill the revenue stream, kill the spammer's business, stop the spam.
Another method is to hit the spammer's website... consider this perl fragment:
while (1)
{
stating the obvious, no server-side java is complete without a DB!
JDBC - mysql or postgresql or oracle-classes.jar
we, an ISP, do lots of networky stuff with SNMP; Jonathan Sevy has a nice easy to use class library: http://edge.mcs.drexel.edu/GICL/people/s evy/snmp/s nmp_package.html
What's all the fuss about? Suse9.1 has had the *option* of installing a 2.6 kernel since, well, forever, and not just in single processor, in SMP too. For example kernel-bigsmp-2.6.4-52.i586
I was happy with this, but took SuSE's config as the basis to built a newer 2.6 kernel from www.kernel.org; it also allowed me to tune my processor and architecture and get rid of the unnecessary cruft.
And KDE3.3 had been available in their "unsupported" downloads section if you wanted to take the risk, as discussed in this forum at
suselinuxsupport
I took the plunge with kde3.3, and it's been completely stable.
along with most geeks, I love compact portable computers, but also bemoan the compromises of portability vs features vs battery life
I have a Sony Clie N770, not the latest, but it has a decent battery life, (10 days) plays mp3, has a colour hi-res screen, but only PalmOs4. It was created before Sony (and Palm in their turn) went mad running high power battery-killing CPUs. Too many people forget these older palms could be close to the ideal handheld. Ebay is now full of people who buy the latest PDA and sell soon when disappointment sets in when the gloss of pointlessly watching tiny videos wears off.
Then there's interesting items like the Siemens SimPad - still in demand but only available on ebay, many people feel it's a grown-up Zaurus. Originally costing over a US$1000, they're now available for less than 20% of that price.
Remember the Audrey? Some people do, and they're still loved.
Remember Cyrix/Geode WebPAD (TM)? Not many do.
When the Newton was first emerging, I recall seeing a demonstration tablet made by Olivetti Research Labs here in Cambridge England. It was a full-size A4 screen, could send/receive faxes etc. Considering a 486 was state of the art, this was a miracle of engineering.
So, whilst I welcome new computers like the OQO, Intel's personal server, the new Zaurus 6000W (unavailable outside Japan - crazy!), until I can actually find one in the stores, see 3rd party developers working with them, and hear from the early adopters, I don't hold my breath as to their practical reality.
I would strongly encourage you to install the systems multiboot, especially if you MUST have windows for the users.
Once you've got the first machine set up, you can then boot linux and trivially take a snapshot of the windows partition.
Clone the disk for each subsequent machine.
This means that you can restore each machine very quickly to a known baseline - just boot linux and login with, say, "winrestore", which will blat over the windows partition then reboot.
You can also test a new windows image on an isolated machine, then roll it out to each public computer in turn, and of course roll-back in the event of problems (think SP2 breaking badly).
I use XOSL for multiboot machines, it's brilliant, and saves a lot of hassles - if you, for example, reinstall windows you can restore the xosl boot menus very easily.
I hate the dynamic task bar too... more tasks means smaller sub-bars for each task, less text etc.
The way I solve it is trivial: drag the task bar so it's vertically on the left.
Tasks always occupy the same width, stacked vertically. Even better, the START button is top left, thus making the UI more logical - move mouse up/left to get to a menu.
The downside is that, being windows, some programs don't understand that the available space for windows is not the full width of the screen; this is fortunately relatively unusual, and I either live with it, make the taskbar temporarily auto-hide, or drag taskbar to the top. Ulead products are the worst offenders, they only run full-screen.
given that most modern pop trash music has only one catch line and repeats endlessly, then they are so self-same similar that if you "steal" 10% you've got the whole song anyway... so you could argue that record 10% is the same as recording 100%, which is thus not fair use!
If you do only take 10% of the song, then perhaps you should only pay 10% of the cost of a single?
Anyway, so much of pop music samples short parts, robs bits of older tracks or is just a plain remix, then who's actually losing out?
Has anyone patented the business model of the RIAA (sue teenagers into submission claiming theft of IP, but don't actually pay all the artists what they are owed)? 'Cos it'd be a very valuable patent - more so than Amazon's half-click one!
The recent program converted a classic rare (the heresy!) Lotus into a hovercraft!
Channel4 TV recently started a series, loosely like "ScrapHeap Challenge" (equivalent to the USA's "Junkyard Wars"), where a team of people have to convert one vehicle into another. Unlike the junkyard/scrapheap, they have money to spend!
I'd love to enter one of these TV programmes, but it seems to me that the key members of the team need to have metal-working skills, welding being the main one! I could do the electrics, but my software skills would probably be wasted:-(
The pixels have to be wider, miniDV specifies the frame format, for PAL it's 720x576 at 50 fps; less pixels for NTSC but at 60Hz.
anamorphic widescreen video has been squeezed horizontally, so when you play back the video the TV "unsqueezes" horizontally it to fill the frame.
You can get 16:9-4:3 adaptor lenses to turn a regular camera into anamorphic w/s, but a decent one is lot$$$. Hence a camcorder with true w/s sensor is best answer.
letterbox widescreen, the worst of all worlds, simply shrinks the picture so that it fits horizontally and thus shrinks vertically, thus when the picture can be played back on old 4:3 screen or stretched in both dimensions on 16:9, but there's a big loss of resolution. Many older camcorders offering widescreen were really just letterboxing - chopping off the top and bottom!
there's a compromise to get what you want... a tiny lightweight camcorder can't be fitted with an ideal lens, will have reduced I/O options due to lack of space. Battery life is also a compromise, the two-hour LiIon battery for my Sony TRV80e is quite big and adds a lot of weight.
Some choices that haven't been examined closely already:
Digital and analogue in options; the former necessary for capturing the edited video from your computer (DV is a disk hog, you will need a DVD writer, or put the video back onto tape unless you're willing to buy many 100+ GB drives)
Widescreen - there are some true widescreen-sensor camcorders now; note that the number of pixels is the same, they're just wider.
Comments on features already discussed here on/.:
Three CCD? Costs a lot extra but the quality may be worth it; beware of GL70 which is 3CCD but doesn't get such good reviews, perhaps because it was a marketing ploy rather than a technical innovation
MiniDV vs micromv vs digital8. Anything except minidv will be a dead loss, the other formats are proprietary or dying. MiniDV tapes are ubiquitous, cheap, available worldwide.
As people said, still image capability should be your lowest priority. USB streaming, bluetooth, etc also vaguely useless (that said you can control and preview pictures on a sony camcorder from certain sony clie PDAs!).
And finally... see if you can borrow one for a long weekend to be sure you'll be able to live with it.
So, just in case I should take SCO seriously, I went to their website and looked at the "buy it" page... nope, no UK number... so they don't even have a sales office here in England!
So I searched for a local distributor (Cambridgeshire), and I found
just one.
These guys use the public Extreme tracker, and according to the stats, this UK distie's sub-site on SCO's has only ever had ONE UNIQUE visitor in the last 20 months!
I looked through some of the UK disties (after guessing the correct URL's because SCO didn't list them properly!), and didn't find ONE that had SCO clearly visible on their website, and a few of them clearly sell other unixes (didn't find linux mentioned though:-(
So, I conclude that SCO are a spent force in the UK and should be laughed at.
Eight years ago perhaps (so long ago I can't remember), I recall myself and colleagues getting our first spams. They were the old pyramid scam, add your name to the bottom, send $10 to the top and strike off the name, then pass it on to ten other people.
We laughed, thinking "what's the point". It never occurred to us that this tiny tiny trickle of junk mail which caused us so much amusement would one day be a constant rain of spam.
There are people today who've never known a time without spam on the 'net, who may not even know that there was a time before spam!
I pray that, somehow, one day, spam as we know it will largely cease to exist, and we'll all look back at the late nineties and early zeroes (!), and shake our head in wonder. We'll remember with anger how we let our governments fail to protect our privacy and freedom from unwanted emails, telephone calls, junk faxes, junk instant messages, junk messages on our mobile phones and so on.
Sadly it's taken far too long for things to change: the UK gov't are incompetent at understanding the message, the European Union councils are overloaded with beaurocracy, and the USA (despite the public pretension to freedom of the people) only protects the interests of big business.
I'm just amazed there haven't been more vigilante actions against spammers, scammers and rogue marketeers.
Slashdot Mirror
To be fair, the BBC are catering to a society who've been happily accepting dumbed-down and biassed TV, Newspapers etc. UK citizens have released their grip on what's important.
Proof positive:
1) more people vote for reality-TV shows like Big Brother than for real-life elections for councils an governments.
2) there was more publicity given to the anti fox-hunting bill than the Civil Contingencies Bill, which was perhaps the most important piece of legislation for 50 years, allowing the gov't to suspend any law and impose martial law merely by insinuating there is a threat.
this is why you should always get a detailed list of the projects on which a consultant/contractor has worked prior to buying services.
if the person has had few or no renewals, then chances are they're one of those consultant/contractor people who are very good at interviews but useless when it actually comes down to doing work.
I've been at a number of companies who've brought in people who've shined at interviews, and its only five weeks in you realise they've not accomplished anything! Naturally, their 3 month contract doesn't get renewes.
I recently changed employer and one of those supposed experts was to my knowledge unemployed but still claiming my former employer as their active client - trying to disguise their history.
So, as well as a detailed list, always check references, or only hire people on recommendation.
large amounts of strongly typed data?
sounds like some sort of persistent object database... google for CORBA, OMG, EJB (enterprise java beans)
It depends on several things:
Firstly, proprietary hardware; they don't use a standard conditional access module (CI-CAM), but the decryption hardware is deeply embedded in the receiver
Secondly, non-standard crypto systems; they don't use or share the crypto algorithms with others; and it's possible to change the algorithm over time to ensure they're a moving target - made possible by proprietary hardware
Finally, a very active private security team who read bulletin boards, blogs, news sites etc; apparently they visit people who get too "interested". Hello NDS people!
It's strongly rumoured that NDS's researchers looked very closely at their rivals' systems to learn how they worked, and on discovering weaknesses posted hacks, so that they discredited the opposition and thus drove revenue their way. More interesting, Sky and their associates have flouted European Commission regulations on open and fair access to their technologies where they have a monopoly.
And for the final irony? The software system driving the set top boxes and the interactive content is called OpenTV, when it is not open at all, and they adapted GNU tools to compile the code and yet didn't contribute those tools back under the GPL until they were forced to!
sorry, you can't criticize Amazon as they patented that.
yeah, but surely any serious geek would find it easier to use his/her home theatre PC running mythtv to down-convert from HDTV source to xvid at 640x480 before loading onto the zaurus?
:-)
--
Here's a smiley I prepared earlier
you can buy a sharp zaurus with far better screen and a handfull of high capacity compact flash or SD cards for this kind of money and get a much more interesting device which would only be half toy. The battery life won't be as good though.
IMHO, these mmedia portables are really just overblown mp3 players, you've had to be pretty desperate to watch whole movies on such a tiny screen (I guess regular long distance flyers might disagree, but then you're crazy anyway!)
A brand new zaurus 6000L go for less than US$500 on ebay now.. the SL-C3000 with the internal hard drive is pretty much the same price and has so much to offer.
a rebuttal to a few points...
:-) :-)
The best space industry has been the USA's. The reason why the ex-Soviet space industry appears to have such a good record is that they only every let people know about the successes - there were many disasters and deaths on the launch pad that were never reported - same as China's.
The best camera companys were in fact Hasselblad, Carl Zeiss, Minox and others. However, the Japanese largely destroyed them. I don't think the US ever had a major camera industry?
The best politicians are American made (and paid for by american businesses!) - Land of the free (if you're a rich tycoon)
The best lawyers are American made (and now funded by the best government money has bought) - Land of the litigated.
The best junk food is American made (all the other food is derivative of foreign food recreated by immigrants).
Here's a few smiley's in case you need them to make this more palatable:
<FX: SLAP>
Oh, your groove! Are you an emporer and have gotten a new groove?
Here's a smiley I made earlier :-)
an RSS feed will do the job nicely; you're using firefox* of course?!
at the slashdot home page, just click on the orange rectangle on the bottom status bar and add the RSS feed to your bookmarks toolbar folder.
*thunderbird also supports RSS, but I'm not impressed with it too much. Opera's RSS client is also quite reasonable. If someone knows of a *free* RSS client for Palm, I'd be grateful to know, I haven't found one yet.
fasttrack visas in the UK make the H1 scheme in the US seem like an insurmountable obstacle. Despite the incredible rise in IT unemployment in the late 1990's and early 2000's, the UK government continued a plan to allow immigrants to go through a fast-track visa system and get work permits very very quickly.
The interesting thing is that the whole fast-track visa system was promoted heavily to the gov't by some of the biggest IT and management consultancies, who... can you see it coming?... yes, hired loads of cheap immigrant programmers/managers but continued to charge huge rates for their work, thus causing layoffs or depressed salaries for British workers, and giving themselves even greater profits!
So, you in the US have a lot to learn about governmental corruption, we in the UK are more inventive at it.
Another method is to hit the spammer's website... consider this perl fragment:
while (1)
{
- $sock = new IO::Socket::INET (
}- Proto => 'tcp',
);PeerAddr => 'website',
PeerPort => '80',
Reuse => 1
$sock->autoflush(1);
push @sockArray, $sock;
Naturally, the above code is for educational purposes only and is not intended to be used in anger
oops, I forgot. we're on /. right, so crypto is a must-have:
these guys know what they're doing, winning awards in a david-vs-goliath arena:
http://www.bouncycastle.org/
stating the obvious, no server-side java is complete without a DB!
s evy/snmp/s nmp_package.html
JDBC - mysql or postgresql or oracle-classes.jar
we, an ISP, do lots of networky stuff with SNMP; Jonathan Sevy has a nice easy to use class library:
http://edge.mcs.drexel.edu/GICL/people/
I was happy with this, but took SuSE's config as the basis to built a newer 2.6 kernel from www.kernel.org; it also allowed me to tune my processor and architecture and get rid of the unnecessary cruft.
And KDE3.3 had been available in their "unsupported" downloads section if you wanted to take the risk, as discussed in this forum at suselinuxsupport
I took the plunge with kde3.3, and it's been completely stable.
I have a Sony Clie N770, not the latest, but it has a decent battery life, (10 days) plays mp3, has a colour hi-res screen, but only PalmOs4. It was created before Sony (and Palm in their turn) went mad running high power battery-killing CPUs. Too many people forget these older palms could be close to the ideal handheld. Ebay is now full of people who buy the latest PDA and sell soon when disappointment sets in when the gloss of pointlessly watching tiny videos wears off.
Then there's interesting items like the Siemens SimPad - still in demand but only available on ebay, many people feel it's a grown-up Zaurus. Originally costing over a US$1000, they're now available for less than 20% of that price.
Remember the Audrey? Some people do, and they're still loved.
Remember Cyrix/Geode WebPAD (TM)? Not many do.
When the Newton was first emerging, I recall seeing a demonstration tablet made by Olivetti Research Labs here in Cambridge England. It was a full-size A4 screen, could send/receive faxes etc. Considering a 486 was state of the art, this was a miracle of engineering.
So, whilst I welcome new computers like the OQO, Intel's personal server, the new Zaurus 6000W (unavailable outside Japan - crazy!), until I can actually find one in the stores, see 3rd party developers working with them, and hear from the early adopters, I don't hold my breath as to their practical reality.
Once you've got the first machine set up, you can then boot linux and trivially take a snapshot of the windows partition.
Clone the disk for each subsequent machine.
This means that you can restore each machine very quickly to a known baseline - just boot linux and login with, say, "winrestore", which will blat over the windows partition then reboot.
You can also test a new windows image on an isolated machine, then roll it out to each public computer in turn, and of course roll-back in the event of problems (think SP2 breaking badly).
I use XOSL for multiboot machines, it's brilliant, and saves a lot of hassles - if you, for example, reinstall windows you can restore the xosl boot menus very easily.
Paul
The way I solve it is trivial: drag the task bar so it's vertically on the left.
Tasks always occupy the same width, stacked vertically. Even better, the START button is top left, thus making the UI more logical - move mouse up/left to get to a menu.
The downside is that, being windows, some programs don't understand that the available space for windows is not the full width of the screen; this is fortunately relatively unusual, and I either live with it, make the taskbar temporarily auto-hide, or drag taskbar to the top. Ulead products are the worst offenders, they only run full-screen.
Paul
If you do only take 10% of the song, then perhaps you should only pay 10% of the cost of a single?
Anyway, so much of pop music samples short parts, robs bits of older tracks or is just a plain remix, then who's actually losing out?
Has anyone patented the business model of the RIAA (sue teenagers into submission claiming theft of IP, but don't actually pay all the artists what they are owed)? 'Cos it'd be a very valuable patent - more so than Amazon's half-click one!
The recent program converted a classic rare (the heresy!) Lotus into a hovercraft!
Channel4 TV recently started a series, loosely like "ScrapHeap Challenge" (equivalent to the USA's "Junkyard Wars"), where a team of people have to convert one vehicle into another. Unlike the junkyard/scrapheap, they have money to spend!
I'd love to enter one of these TV programmes, but it seems to me that the key members of the team need to have metal-working skills, welding being the main one! I could do the electrics, but my software skills would probably be wasted :-(
anamorphic widescreen video has been squeezed horizontally, so when you play back the video the TV "unsqueezes" horizontally it to fill the frame. You can get 16:9-4:3 adaptor lenses to turn a regular camera into anamorphic w/s, but a decent one is lot$$$. Hence a camcorder with true w/s sensor is best answer.
letterbox widescreen, the worst of all worlds, simply shrinks the picture so that it fits horizontally and thus shrinks vertically, thus when the picture can be played back on old 4:3 screen or stretched in both dimensions on 16:9, but there's a big loss of resolution. Many older camcorders offering widescreen were really just letterboxing - chopping off the top and bottom!
HTH
Paul
Quality
Size
I/O options
Widescreen
there's a compromise to get what you want... a tiny lightweight camcorder can't be fitted with an ideal lens, will have reduced I/O options due to lack of space. Battery life is also a compromise, the two-hour LiIon battery for my Sony TRV80e is quite big and adds a lot of weight.
Some choices that haven't been examined closely already:
Digital and analogue in options; the former necessary for capturing the edited video from your computer (DV is a disk hog, you will need a DVD writer, or put the video back onto tape unless you're willing to buy many 100+ GB drives)
Widescreen - there are some true widescreen-sensor camcorders now; note that the number of pixels is the same, they're just wider.
Comments on features already discussed here on /.:
Three CCD? Costs a lot extra but the quality may be worth it; beware of GL70 which is 3CCD but doesn't get such good reviews, perhaps because it was a marketing ploy rather than a technical innovation
MiniDV vs micromv vs digital8. Anything except minidv will be a dead loss, the other formats are proprietary or dying. MiniDV tapes are ubiquitous, cheap, available worldwide.
As people said, still image capability should be your lowest priority. USB streaming, bluetooth, etc also vaguely useless (that said you can control and preview pictures on a sony camcorder from certain sony clie PDAs!).
And finally... see if you can borrow one for a long weekend to be sure you'll be able to live with it.
So I searched for a local distributor (Cambridgeshire), and I found just one.
These guys use the public Extreme tracker, and according to the stats, this UK distie's sub-site on SCO's has only ever had ONE UNIQUE visitor in the last 20 months!
I looked through some of the UK disties (after guessing the correct URL's because SCO didn't list them properly!), and didn't find ONE that had SCO clearly visible on their website, and a few of them clearly sell other unixes (didn't find linux mentioned though :-(
So, I conclude that SCO are a spent force in the UK and should be laughed at.
We laughed, thinking "what's the point". It never occurred to us that this tiny tiny trickle of junk mail which caused us so much amusement would one day be a constant rain of spam.
There are people today who've never known a time without spam on the 'net, who may not even know that there was a time before spam!
I pray that, somehow, one day, spam as we know it will largely cease to exist, and we'll all look back at the late nineties and early zeroes (!), and shake our head in wonder. We'll remember with anger how we let our governments fail to protect our privacy and freedom from unwanted emails, telephone calls, junk faxes, junk instant messages, junk messages on our mobile phones and so on.
Sadly it's taken far too long for things to change: the UK gov't are incompetent at understanding the message, the European Union councils are overloaded with beaurocracy, and the USA (despite the public pretension to freedom of the people) only protects the interests of big business.
I'm just amazed there haven't been more vigilante actions against spammers, scammers and rogue marketeers.
Sigh.