These laws about lawns have to do with money: some people seem to have various ideas about what constitutes an "acceptable" lawn and when they move into a neighbourhood where the lawns are not up to their standards, they are less willing to spend much money on real estate in that region. Therefore, as a result of the economic law of supply and demand, property prices fall and property owners lose money. When this happens, it doesn't get long for relevant laws to be formulated. People supporting such laws base them on the idea that property is not really absolute and is depended on what they consider good community integration, and that while a person might own some real estate they do not, and cannot, control the view that they project outside their property. The view is owned by those who see it, ie the other people in the area, and therefore, supporters of such laws say, they have a right to define what an acceptable view is.
To understand the idea of these laws, think of how would you feel if somebody in your neighbourhood put up a big poster on the lawn of their property in support of an evil terrorist that you hate. While the property and the lawn is theirs, they project a view outside their property (if there is no solid wall) that damages your mental well-being, so the law recognises some rights to you as well, namely the right to enjoy an "acceptable" view in your neighbourhood and not feel uncomfortable while looking into other people's lawns (but a person supporting the view of absolute property could ask, of course, why in the first place you wish to look into other people's lawns while you walk down the street and if this could be considered a form of stealing or espionage!).
Of course these laws and the philosophy that their supporters profess is in contrast with the idea of property as something absolute, which *is* applied in various other kinds of laws or in other jurisdictions, so it is hard to find real consistency. It is more about who has the ability to influence lawmakers and who doesn't: people who are smart can and derive economic benefit, while stupid people cannot and are at a disadvantage (a great example of Darwinian evolution, as it enables smarter people to better support their children, while those who were too stupid to get into politics or influence their local lawmakers get nothing or lose, it also confirms the ancient Greek proverb: if you don't care about politics, then politics will care about you!).
I would never use a browser having its tabs under the address bar: when using the pointing device you should travel more screen real estate to switch tabs, and this is a Bad Thing.
The people you talked to were probably employees. But in China there are real slaves as well. I have read many times that the communist government of China forces its people to work in prisons for making products that then sells to the West. I think they call this "education through labour" but of course it's not about education, it's about slavery. These people are imprisoned and cannot choose not to work. If this isn't the definition of slavery then what is it? This also shows us the true face of communism, that is a ruling class totally enslaving the whole of society for the benefit of the communist rulers.
Problems with overtime pay is one more reason to start up a business working as a consultant or provide your services as freelance rather than sign a full employment contract. Being a business or freelance, it is up to you then to charge for your work.
Let's assume that this is true, and not the imagination of some journalist. Before starting making comments about what the discovery might be, I would suggest first checking to see what instruments are onboard. Phoenix can't find something it can't look out for. Therefore it makes sense to first know what it can find before trying to make a prediction of what it might have found. Of course, the discovery may not be about something it *found* but rather about something it carried (eg Earth microbes contaminated Mars or something), but again it should have an instrument capable of detecting such contamination. Therefore, before making predictions, head up here to read about Phoenix's instruments.
All children ask many "why" questions to their parents, showing evidence of curiosity. Science and scholarship begin from curiosity, and curiosity is the fuel of self-motivation. I think most if not all children have curiosity as a natural instinct, but something in our society destroys their curiosity and they cease to be self-motivated.
The problem is not in the children's brains, but rather in our societies, our schools, our families, and how we treat our children. Something in our society kills the natural curiosity that all children have.
Next time your child asks why the sky is blue or why GNU/Linux is cool, don't say "I have no time to tell you".
It really makes no sense to ask a president discose their medical record, since that's why we have vice presidents: in case the president can't work, the vice president takes the lead. And I think that when you vote for a president you choose a vice president at the same time as well (they go in pairs), so by voting for one you immediately express your confidence for the other as well in case they need to be declared the new acting president.
Any corporation whose success is dependent on just one person is not a good corporation and not worth investing in.
Sure the CEO is important, but they are just one person among thousands. Business continuity plans *should* have a plan in case the CEO dies or is abducted or killed. Someone else who is just as smart and able to run the business should take the CEO's role in no time in case the CEO can't work.
Corporations that don't have that kind of business continuity planning should plan for such a possibility as soon as possible. It makes no sense to do business as a corporation if your whole success depends on just one person.
If such business continuity plan is in place, it does not matter how healthy the CEO or anyone else is, as someone equally capable will take their place immediatelly.
If we develop the technology to save Earth from asteroids, and one endangers us, and a state (let's say the US) saves the whole planet by hitting it, then it wouldn't be unreasonable to say that the state which did so would have the right to ask for payment or something akin to taxes from other states, since hitting the asteroid saved them and their economy as well (it's no different that the service a military provides to a state). With this in mind, developing anti-asteroid technology could prove a lucrative income for whoever does so first!
Even if we become capable of protecting our home planet against asteroids, we are doomed as our civilisation has an expiration date which is due soon, considering Yellowstone's history of eruptions. Next time you go to see the geysers there remember that what is under this strange hot thing there has the capability to destroy all of us and in fact monitoring shows us that the underground magma is moving upwards.
Supervolcanoes killed nearly all of us 74 000 years ago, and we are all descendants of the few survivors, which explains our low DNA variation. Dinosaurs may have got extinct by volcanism too, and the asteroid that most people think killed them may have only killed the few survivors after the volcanism.
Many things in this world are uncertain, but there is one thing which we can be absolutely certain about: the death of our species as long as we keep living on Earth. Even if we hit an incoming asteroid, we will die from a supervolcano, and even if we manage to survive that we will cause nuclear winter nevertheless thanks to our stupidity.
The only reasonable thing to do when faced with so many dangers is to get out of here as soon as possible: Invest in spacecraft and research new propulsion techniques and life support technologies, so that we can colonise the Moon and Mars within a short timeframe. With one planet we are all doomed to extinction, either by asteroid, by volcanism, or war. With two or more planets to call home we can survive asteroids and volcanism, and maybe war if we don't invent any planetary-scale nuclear warheard. Of course a gamma ray burst, mini black hole randomly travelling around, or our own sun's death may still eradicate all of us even if we colonise the entire solar system, but this is solved easily by colonising more star systems once we invent even better propulsion systems and even better life support. The only possibilities we may find no solution for are war (if we get the technology to travel to the stars, some military people will surely find a way to nuke distant star systems as well!) and the heat death of the universe (but this isn't certain, therefore leaving only war as the only non-solvable threat to our civilisation).
To study stupidity! Our societies offer undeniable evidence for the existence of stupidity in this universe. Evidence becomes even stronger when you discover that there exist people who vote for whoever politician looks charmer on a hypnotising TV screen.
Now if somebody could explain me why university went through Big Bang, all these stars and galaxies, all these chemical elements, and all these planets and life forms, for eventually creating stupidity? Sounds like the universe, or at least the Earth, is trying to commit suicide by creating a stupid species of monkeys capable of massive nuclear war.
you can have a degree in aeronautical engineering [...] and still have totally pseudoscientific, non-evidence-based views
Or a brilliant business idea.
This planet is full of stupid people willing to say goodbye to their hard-earned money for buying conspiracy books and DVDs about UFOs, thus filling their brain with more stupidity and making smarter people rich.
A coverup? A massive worldwide coverup? C'mon. Is there anyone really believing that governments are capable of it? Do you remember stories about Word documents with metadata that revealed more than intented? Governments aren't capable of covering much simpler things, let alone UFOs.
I think the keyboard works the best and will always work the best.
I have a Flybook netbook which has a touchscreen in addition to a classic keyboard and a pointstick (which every laptop should have, instead of the evil touchpad), and its screen can also rotate so that it can work either in clamshell laptop mode or in tablet mode.
Advertisements of it focus a lot on the touchscreen and convertible tablet mode. Guess what, I am only using the tablet and touchscreen functions around 1% of the time, as they are comfortable for only specific uses and positions.
Most of the time I use the good old keyboard and the pointstick in the classic clamshell laptop format, and it suits me. What touchpad/touchscreen/tablet supporters are smoking is beyond me.
Sure it's nice to have a touchscreen or tablet mode as an *additional* feature, in *addition* to the keyboard and pointing device, but *replacing* the good old interfaces for a touchscreen is stupid IMHO.
Only an insensitive clod would desire a world where the touchscreen is god and facial recognition the goddess.
I, for one, am faithful to the ancient religion of the trackball, the one true religion of your interface, and intend to remain faithful to it for ever. No touchscreen is going to make me leave my beloved trackball god.
Mice are for the weak and their days are numbered, but touchscreens and facial recognition are for the evil. Don't sell your soul to touchscreens! Get a trackball and find your eternal true love. If you don't, your infidel soul is going to be deleted from the memory of this universe.
Yours faithfully,
Your Trackball Church Proselytisation Minister, also known as the Propaganda Minister of the Trackball Empire.
Some people say why go to space and let's focus on human problems on Earth. I am really fed up reading such comments, especially on fora where I would expect people to have other interests than food and playgirls. These people are obviously not nerds. Non-nerds's only interest in life is to eat well and live well, but nerds go beyond that. Nerds have passions: they are passionate about inquiring. Nerds want to know everything and not knowing the history of Mars is a very real problem for a nerd. A nerd is a machine posing questions and seeking answers for them, and unanswered questions act like real torture on the nerd's brain. Thus, by going to Mars and more closely examining its history, the nerds can solve the very real problem (for them) of not knowing everything about Mars.
And don't laugh, without nerds your societies would be still in the dark ages, praying to FSM for rain and trying to cure people with talismans. It is thanks to nerds that you today have highways, computers, and aeroplanes.
Of course I am not saying that passion for knowledge should be the sole reason for spending euros in research. Practical considerations are important as well, and space science does indeed help solve human problems, as scientific research always has secondary uses in other fields.
It wasn't designed for that purpose, but even if we send it there we will still need one around Earth (and of course we will need a way to finance it and service it, while we know that we face great difficulties servicing ISS around Earth right now...), so it's better to build a second station specifically for the Moon rather than contemplating sending ISS there.
If you want to work with European engineers, knowledge of French or German or both will help a lot. If you focus in the US, learn Spanish. After you have learnt one of these, you could start thinking about Japanese or Chinese. I personally have picked up French and German.
The acceptance statisticts they collect suggest that most people prefer to be scanned when the alternative is a stripsearch. What their statistics don't count is how many people choose to travel by other means rather than big aircrafts (there are so many ways to get wherever you want to go: private plane or heli if you have one, rail, bus, private car, or even by walking, and in the near future maybe even by using a private spaceplane if you can afford it). If security theatre and paranoia continues, people will just stop paying for air travel and seek other means to move. We had no airplanes in 500 BCE, 1600 CE, or 1800 CE and yet economy funtioned so well. Unless you are in an emergency, there is rarely a real need to use an airplane, especially if you embrace telecommuting. While I agree that terrorists should be eradicated, I do not think that eroding our freedom-loving culture is the way forward. Except from that, it's also extremely costly: Terrorists surely laugh as our economies burn millions of dollars or euros in an attempt to protect ourselves, while they can do lots of damage to us simply by spending a few hundreds or thousands. Basic economic theory suggests that we need to find cheaper ways to protect our lands, or else we are screwed. Big spending doesn't seem the right way, and I think that if we don't want to risk future terrorist attacks we should invest in decentralisation (it gets harder for the terrorist to attack if there are no big concentrated targets). So, instead of continuing to build huge airports and massive airplanes, start investing in lots of small airstrips all over the rural and urban communities and develop small flexible planes carrying just 10-15 people each, or even flying private cars. If there is mass production of small airstrips and private planes and sufficient demand to support it, the prices will be cheaper than the airfares we pay today, and thanks to decentralisation terrorists won't be a problem for air travel anymore.
When I need a PC, I just buy the parts and assemble it myself. Is there anyone out there, apart from newbies and business people, who buys full computers? Assembling a PC is so much fun that I cannot imagine any reason to buy a preassembled PC, except if we are talking about laptops.
Any self-respecting nerd runs their own mailserver, either at home or in a datacentre. My own email server is actually in a datacentre and works brilliantly. It is extremely easy to set up and maintain one, with full antispam and TLS secure encryption features. Mine runs Debian GNU/Linux 4.0 etch with exim and spamassassin. Installation was easy, maintainance is ok, spamming settings are doable with some creative thinking and monitoring. I cannot see why anyone with basic GNU/Linux skills couldn't roll out their own server, even at home. It is faster than Google Mail, more secure, more personal, more private, and under your complete control. And if you want the stability of a datacentre the fees aren't that much (mine, at the moment, is just 112 EUR per month, root access, 100mbps in Denmark).
Slashdot Mirror
These laws about lawns have to do with money: some people seem to have various ideas about what constitutes an "acceptable" lawn and when they move into a neighbourhood where the lawns are not up to their standards, they are less willing to spend much money on real estate in that region. Therefore, as a result of the economic law of supply and demand, property prices fall and property owners lose money. When this happens, it doesn't get long for relevant laws to be formulated. People supporting such laws base them on the idea that property is not really absolute and is depended on what they consider good community integration, and that while a person might own some real estate they do not, and cannot, control the view that they project outside their property. The view is owned by those who see it, ie the other people in the area, and therefore, supporters of such laws say, they have a right to define what an acceptable view is.
To understand the idea of these laws, think of how would you feel if somebody in your neighbourhood put up a big poster on the lawn of their property in support of an evil terrorist that you hate. While the property and the lawn is theirs, they project a view outside their property (if there is no solid wall) that damages your mental well-being, so the law recognises some rights to you as well, namely the right to enjoy an "acceptable" view in your neighbourhood and not feel uncomfortable while looking into other people's lawns (but a person supporting the view of absolute property could ask, of course, why in the first place you wish to look into other people's lawns while you walk down the street and if this could be considered a form of stealing or espionage!).
Of course these laws and the philosophy that their supporters profess is in contrast with the idea of property as something absolute, which *is* applied in various other kinds of laws or in other jurisdictions, so it is hard to find real consistency. It is more about who has the ability to influence lawmakers and who doesn't: people who are smart can and derive economic benefit, while stupid people cannot and are at a disadvantage (a great example of Darwinian evolution, as it enables smarter people to better support their children, while those who were too stupid to get into politics or influence their local lawmakers get nothing or lose, it also confirms the ancient Greek proverb: if you don't care about politics, then politics will care about you!).
I would never use a browser having its tabs under the address bar: when using the pointing device you should travel more screen real estate to switch tabs, and this is a Bad Thing.
The people you talked to were probably employees. But in China there are real slaves as well. I have read many times that the communist government of China forces its people to work in prisons for making products that then sells to the West. I think they call this "education through labour" but of course it's not about education, it's about slavery. These people are imprisoned and cannot choose not to work. If this isn't the definition of slavery then what is it? This also shows us the true face of communism, that is a ruling class totally enslaving the whole of society for the benefit of the communist rulers.
Problems with overtime pay is one more reason to start up a business working as a consultant or provide your services as freelance rather than sign a full employment contract. Being a business or freelance, it is up to you then to charge for your work.
Let's assume that this is true, and not the imagination of some journalist. Before starting making comments about what the discovery might be, I would suggest first checking to see what instruments are onboard. Phoenix can't find something it can't look out for. Therefore it makes sense to first know what it can find before trying to make a prediction of what it might have found. Of course, the discovery may not be about something it *found* but rather about something it carried (eg Earth microbes contaminated Mars or something), but again it should have an instrument capable of detecting such contamination. Therefore, before making predictions, head up here to read about Phoenix's instruments.
Most students are not self-motivated
All children ask many "why" questions to their parents, showing evidence of curiosity. Science and scholarship begin from curiosity, and curiosity is the fuel of self-motivation. I think most if not all children have curiosity as a natural instinct, but something in our society destroys their curiosity and they cease to be self-motivated.
The problem is not in the children's brains, but rather in our societies, our schools, our families, and how we treat our children. Something in our society kills the natural curiosity that all children have.
Next time your child asks why the sky is blue or why GNU/Linux is cool, don't say "I have no time to tell you".
It really makes no sense to ask a president discose their medical record, since that's why we have vice presidents: in case the president can't work, the vice president takes the lead. And I think that when you vote for a president you choose a vice president at the same time as well (they go in pairs), so by voting for one you immediately express your confidence for the other as well in case they need to be declared the new acting president.
Any corporation whose success is dependent on just one person is not a good corporation and not worth investing in.
Sure the CEO is important, but they are just one person among thousands. Business continuity plans *should* have a plan in case the CEO dies or is abducted or killed. Someone else who is just as smart and able to run the business should take the CEO's role in no time in case the CEO can't work.
Corporations that don't have that kind of business continuity planning should plan for such a possibility as soon as possible. It makes no sense to do business as a corporation if your whole success depends on just one person.
If such business continuity plan is in place, it does not matter how healthy the CEO or anyone else is, as someone equally capable will take their place immediatelly.
If we develop the technology to save Earth from asteroids, and one endangers us, and a state (let's say the US) saves the whole planet by hitting it, then it wouldn't be unreasonable to say that the state which did so would have the right to ask for payment or something akin to taxes from other states, since hitting the asteroid saved them and their economy as well (it's no different that the service a military provides to a state). With this in mind, developing anti-asteroid technology could prove a lucrative income for whoever does so first!
Even if we become capable of protecting our home planet against asteroids, we are doomed as our civilisation has an expiration date which is due soon, considering Yellowstone's history of eruptions. Next time you go to see the geysers there remember that what is under this strange hot thing there has the capability to destroy all of us and in fact monitoring shows us that the underground magma is moving upwards.
Supervolcanoes killed nearly all of us 74 000 years ago, and we are all descendants of the few survivors, which explains our low DNA variation. Dinosaurs may have got extinct by volcanism too, and the asteroid that most people think killed them may have only killed the few survivors after the volcanism.
Many things in this world are uncertain, but there is one thing which we can be absolutely certain about: the death of our species as long as we keep living on Earth. Even if we hit an incoming asteroid, we will die from a supervolcano, and even if we manage to survive that we will cause nuclear winter nevertheless thanks to our stupidity.
The only reasonable thing to do when faced with so many dangers is to get out of here as soon as possible: Invest in spacecraft and research new propulsion techniques and life support technologies, so that we can colonise the Moon and Mars within a short timeframe. With one planet we are all doomed to extinction, either by asteroid, by volcanism, or war. With two or more planets to call home we can survive asteroids and volcanism, and maybe war if we don't invent any planetary-scale nuclear warheard. Of course a gamma ray burst, mini black hole randomly travelling around, or our own sun's death may still eradicate all of us even if we colonise the entire solar system, but this is solved easily by colonising more star systems once we invent even better propulsion systems and even better life support. The only possibilities we may find no solution for are war (if we get the technology to travel to the stars, some military people will surely find a way to nuke distant star systems as well!) and the heat death of the universe (but this isn't certain, therefore leaving only war as the only non-solvable threat to our civilisation).
I really wonder why a company would choose a name that reminds me of embargo, which is related to a boycott. Doesn't look like a good name to me.
why would they stop here?
To study stupidity! Our societies offer undeniable evidence for the existence of stupidity in this universe. Evidence becomes even stronger when you discover that there exist people who vote for whoever politician looks charmer on a hypnotising TV screen.
Now if somebody could explain me why university went through Big Bang, all these stars and galaxies, all these chemical elements, and all these planets and life forms, for eventually creating stupidity? Sounds like the universe, or at least the Earth, is trying to commit suicide by creating a stupid species of monkeys capable of massive nuclear war.
you can have a degree in aeronautical engineering [...] and still have totally pseudoscientific, non-evidence-based views
Or a brilliant business idea.
This planet is full of stupid people willing to say goodbye to their hard-earned money for buying conspiracy books and DVDs about UFOs, thus filling their brain with more stupidity and making smarter people rich.
A coverup? A massive worldwide coverup? C'mon. Is there anyone really believing that governments are capable of it? Do you remember stories about Word documents with metadata that revealed more than intented? Governments aren't capable of covering much simpler things, let alone UFOs.
If real this violates the honour system and makes it impossible for a university to enact a honour system.
I think the keyboard works the best and will always work the best.
I have a Flybook netbook which has a touchscreen in addition to a classic keyboard and a pointstick (which every laptop should have, instead of the evil touchpad), and its screen can also rotate so that it can work either in clamshell laptop mode or in tablet mode.
Advertisements of it focus a lot on the touchscreen and convertible tablet mode. Guess what, I am only using the tablet and touchscreen functions around 1% of the time, as they are comfortable for only specific uses and positions.
Most of the time I use the good old keyboard and the pointstick in the classic clamshell laptop format, and it suits me. What touchpad/touchscreen/tablet supporters are smoking is beyond me.
Sure it's nice to have a touchscreen or tablet mode as an *additional* feature, in *addition* to the keyboard and pointing device, but *replacing* the good old interfaces for a touchscreen is stupid IMHO.
Only an insensitive clod would desire a world where the touchscreen is god and facial recognition the goddess.
I, for one, am faithful to the ancient religion of the trackball, the one true religion of your interface, and intend to remain faithful to it for ever. No touchscreen is going to make me leave my beloved trackball god.
Mice are for the weak and their days are numbered, but touchscreens and facial recognition are for the evil. Don't sell your soul to touchscreens! Get a trackball and find your eternal true love. If you don't, your infidel soul is going to be deleted from the memory of this universe.
Yours faithfully,
Your Trackball Church Proselytisation Minister, also known as the Propaganda Minister of the Trackball Empire.
Some people say why go to space and let's focus on human problems on Earth. I am really fed up reading such comments, especially on fora where I would expect people to have other interests than food and playgirls. These people are obviously not nerds. Non-nerds's only interest in life is to eat well and live well, but nerds go beyond that. Nerds have passions: they are passionate about inquiring. Nerds want to know everything and not knowing the history of Mars is a very real problem for a nerd. A nerd is a machine posing questions and seeking answers for them, and unanswered questions act like real torture on the nerd's brain. Thus, by going to Mars and more closely examining its history, the nerds can solve the very real problem (for them) of not knowing everything about Mars.
And don't laugh, without nerds your societies would be still in the dark ages, praying to FSM for rain and trying to cure people with talismans. It is thanks to nerds that you today have highways, computers, and aeroplanes.
Of course I am not saying that passion for knowledge should be the sole reason for spending euros in research. Practical considerations are important as well, and space science does indeed help solve human problems, as scientific research always has secondary uses in other fields.
It wasn't designed for that purpose, but even if we send it there we will still need one around Earth (and of course we will need a way to finance it and service it, while we know that we face great difficulties servicing ISS around Earth right now...), so it's better to build a second station specifically for the Moon rather than contemplating sending ISS there.
If you want to work with European engineers, knowledge of French or German or both will help a lot. If you focus in the US, learn Spanish. After you have learnt one of these, you could start thinking about Japanese or Chinese. I personally have picked up French and German.
Why are they surprised that the same person is the right person for both parties? The two parties are so similar, as they are in any two-party system.
If you can afford it you can just buy whatever you need at your destination (if it's available!).
The acceptance statisticts they collect suggest that most people prefer to be scanned when the alternative is a stripsearch. What their statistics don't count is how many people choose to travel by other means rather than big aircrafts (there are so many ways to get wherever you want to go: private plane or heli if you have one, rail, bus, private car, or even by walking, and in the near future maybe even by using a private spaceplane if you can afford it). If security theatre and paranoia continues, people will just stop paying for air travel and seek other means to move. We had no airplanes in 500 BCE, 1600 CE, or 1800 CE and yet economy funtioned so well. Unless you are in an emergency, there is rarely a real need to use an airplane, especially if you embrace telecommuting. While I agree that terrorists should be eradicated, I do not think that eroding our freedom-loving culture is the way forward. Except from that, it's also extremely costly: Terrorists surely laugh as our economies burn millions of dollars or euros in an attempt to protect ourselves, while they can do lots of damage to us simply by spending a few hundreds or thousands. Basic economic theory suggests that we need to find cheaper ways to protect our lands, or else we are screwed. Big spending doesn't seem the right way, and I think that if we don't want to risk future terrorist attacks we should invest in decentralisation (it gets harder for the terrorist to attack if there are no big concentrated targets). So, instead of continuing to build huge airports and massive airplanes, start investing in lots of small airstrips all over the rural and urban communities and develop small flexible planes carrying just 10-15 people each, or even flying private cars. If there is mass production of small airstrips and private planes and sufficient demand to support it, the prices will be cheaper than the airfares we pay today, and thanks to decentralisation terrorists won't be a problem for air travel anymore.
When I need a PC, I just buy the parts and assemble it myself. Is there anyone out there, apart from newbies and business people, who buys full computers? Assembling a PC is so much fun that I cannot imagine any reason to buy a preassembled PC, except if we are talking about laptops.
Any self-respecting nerd runs their own mailserver, either at home or in a datacentre. My own email server is actually in a datacentre and works brilliantly. It is extremely easy to set up and maintain one, with full antispam and TLS secure encryption features. Mine runs Debian GNU/Linux 4.0 etch with exim and spamassassin. Installation was easy, maintainance is ok, spamming settings are doable with some creative thinking and monitoring. I cannot see why anyone with basic GNU/Linux skills couldn't roll out their own server, even at home. It is faster than Google Mail, more secure, more personal, more private, and under your complete control. And if you want the stability of a datacentre the fees aren't that much (mine, at the moment, is just 112 EUR per month, root access, 100mbps in Denmark).