If there was a Guiness book of records for IT, that feat would belong there - yet another meaningless record in the vein of baking the world's largest hamburger or hosting a musical chairs game with the most participants in human history.
Seriously though, I think the bigger problem is from the lack of light! If you go to those same regions (north of the arctic circle), you'll find abnormally high suicide rates during the winter due to depression from the excessive darkness.
As Mikka Luttinen (the vocalist for a reasonably well-known Finnish black metal band Impaled Nazarene) put it: "In Finland, it's dark for ten months a year. You either start a band or cut your wrists".
And here where I live (a northern part of Russia), street lamps get turned off after 10 pm in August, so getting home after long coding sessions becomes an exercise in celestial navigation.
I had once stumbled upon an interview with the guy in charge of Demetrius Software, a russian spamming company. He genuinely believed he was doing the right thing, and, indeed, helping his clients achieve their business goals.
He illustrated the effectiveness of spamming thusly. My services cost $500 (can't remember the actual figure, but it was something to that effect), he said, for sending messages out to a list of 4 million addresses. However, I had more than once been approached by people starting small businesses and not having even $100 in their budget for advertising, asking to, like, send their spam to 400,000 people for $70. I never refused, he said, and guess what - all of them were repeat customers coming back in a short while and ordering full-scale mailings for the full price.
This would only mean, he reasoned, that spamming boosted their business well enough.
The fun part is that while spam is technically legal in Russia, flooding somebody's phone number isn't, and is classified as a minor criminal offense.
On the other hand, the American Language Center is THE evil spammer of the.RU net and completely deserves such treatment. Their spam volleys are regular, annoying, and use all sorts of clever tricks to circumvent spam filters. By contrast, a lot of russian-originated spam (at least spam that I receive) is very business-oriented and largely contains honest-to-God offers to sell you tires, or electric cable or some other commodity, or seminar invitations; stuff you wouldn't show to your kids is extremely uncommon.
In fact, more than once incoming spam had left me thinking that had I been involved in commerce, I'd probably even react to those offers.
Slashdot Mirror
..."_Turing_ Boring Machine". :)
First thoughts were: "is that some sort of new ThinkGeek offering"?
If there was a Guiness book of records for IT, that feat would belong there - yet another meaningless record in the vein of baking the world's largest hamburger or hosting a musical chairs game with the most participants in human history.
No, it's Magadan - a city once famous for Gulag.
I suppose the only thing present-day Magadan is famous for is that it's the city that stands as a comment for the GMT +11 zone in Microsoft Windows:
GMT +11 - Magadan, Solomon Is., New Caledonia.
Oh, and yes: somehow Slashdot DOES NOT give you an option to select GMT+11 as your time zone. This makes me feel special in some strange way.
Seriously though, I think the bigger problem is from the lack of light! If you go to those same regions (north of the arctic circle), you'll find abnormally high suicide rates during the winter due to depression from the excessive darkness.
As Mikka Luttinen (the vocalist for a reasonably well-known Finnish black metal band Impaled Nazarene) put it: "In Finland, it's dark for ten months a year. You either start a band or cut your wrists".
And here where I live (a northern part of Russia), street lamps get turned off after 10 pm in August, so getting home after long coding sessions becomes an exercise in celestial navigation.
I had once stumbled upon an interview with the guy in charge of Demetrius Software, a russian spamming company. He genuinely believed he was doing the right thing, and, indeed, helping his clients achieve their business goals.
He illustrated the effectiveness of spamming thusly. My services cost $500 (can't remember the actual figure, but it was something to that effect), he said, for sending messages out to a list of 4 million addresses. However, I had more than once been approached by people starting small businesses and not having even $100 in their budget for advertising, asking to, like, send their spam to 400,000 people for $70. I never refused, he said, and guess what - all of them were repeat customers coming back in a short while and ordering full-scale mailings for the full price.
This would only mean, he reasoned, that spamming boosted their business well enough.
The fun part is that while spam is technically legal in Russia, flooding somebody's phone number isn't, and is classified as a minor criminal offense.
.RU net and completely deserves such treatment. Their spam volleys are regular, annoying, and use all sorts of clever tricks to circumvent spam filters. By contrast, a lot of russian-originated spam (at least spam that I receive) is very business-oriented and largely contains honest-to-God offers to sell you tires, or electric cable or some other commodity, or seminar invitations; stuff you wouldn't show to your kids is extremely uncommon.
On the other hand, the American Language Center is THE evil spammer of the
In fact, more than once incoming spam had left me thinking that had I been involved in commerce, I'd probably even react to those offers.