I'm sure this will work out perfectly for them. I mean, take a look up here at Canada. Best Buy Canada is owned by Future Shop. And Future Shop opened their own digital music download store, too. It's called Bonfire, and...
Wait, what's that? Oh, okay, it wasn't really their own download store. It was just Puretracks with a custom skin on it. In any case, it blazed their trail into the future of music downloads and...
Huh? Oh. Okay, it turns out Bonfire was a massive flop and was shut down this year.
Well, in any case, I'm sure that Best Buy USA's third-party, rebranded online music store will do much better than Best Buy Canada's third-party, re-branded online music store did.
PS: To give you an idea of how well this is going to turn out, this is the same company that decided it would be a good idea to sell "branded" mp3 players. Basically it was 128MB player that "came with" a few tracks, all for the low, low price of $169. Mmm, dollar-store MP3 player with DRM'd tracks for more than the cost of an iPod. Success!
"We take the IP address, get all the information that we need from it and then throw out the address,"
But do they put the IP Addresses through the shredder and have them taken away by a certified disposal company? Or do they just chuck them in the bin where anyone can find them by digging through a couple piles of broken chairs and crushed souls?
Those are two completely different species of fish. That's like saying "why is the iPhone so great when we already have small computers in the form of an EEE PC"
One message includes bin Laden's denial of having anything to do with the September 11, 2001 attacks in New York City, Washington, D.C. and Pennsylvania.
"Following the latest explosions in the United States, some Americans are pointing the finger at me, but I deny that because I have not done it. The United States has always accused me of these incidents which have been caused by its enemies. Reiterating once again, I say that I have not done it, and the perpetrators have carried this out because of their own interest," said bin Laden on September 16, 2001, just five days after the attacks.
As another poster pointed out, the messages may have been mistranslated by CIA operatives. They missed some of the nuances of the original language. I think I know what they were missing: something about infliction at the start and end of the message. I can't remember exactly how it works in the original language, but I believe it translates roughly into:
If the ad itself is being talked about, then it has been successful on some level.
Not really. The point of an ad is to implant the product in people's minds, not the ad itself. Yes, the ad works, but you need to complete that sentence: "The ad is successful... at getting people to talk about the ad."
It's a fallacy to assume that the ad being well-known is directly correlated to the amount of product it will push. One of the best examples are those stupid bench ads. I'm sure you've seen it. They're on bus and park benches, and read "You just proved bench advertising works. Call us at 555-1234 to place your ad."
By reading the ad, the only thing you've proved is that there exists a subset of people in the population who read the ads. The only thing that "worked" was that you read it. Now, if you saw a bench ad for an ad company, and called them up and purchased ad space with them, THEN they can say "you just proved bench advertising works to sell product to people who read the bench ad".
So until people start buying Microsoft products and explicitly stating that they did so because of the commercial, there's no real way to prove it "worked". It's like a saying ad people have: "50% of my advertising dollars are effective. I just don't know which 50%."
The only exception that I know of are the food defamation laws that the agricultural industry has persuaded about a dozen states to pass. These which create civil liability for claiming that a perishable food product or commodity is unsafe for human consumption.
During a show about mad cow disease with Howard Lyman (aired on April 16, 1996), Winfrey exclaimed, "It has just stopped me cold from eating another burger!" Texas cattlemen sued her and Lyman in early 1998 for "false defamation of perishable food" and "business disparagement", claiming that Winfrey's remarks subsequently sent cattle prices tumbling, costing beef producers some USD$12 million. On February 26, after a trial spanning over two months in an Amarillo, Texas court in the thick of cattle country, a jury found Winfrey and Lyman were not liable for damages.
Building hybrids uses machinery that pollutes the environment. The solution? Ship the parts of a hybrid individually and get your customers to put the car together themselves.
And you plan on shipping those parts using what exactly? I'm willing to be that the energy used to plant-machine the car then drive it to my house on hybrid power, and the energy used to fossil-fueled 18-wheeler ship a ton of crap to my house are at least on par-- if the latter is not even worse.
And what about packaging? Because seriously, if this is what cmos batteries take to ship, I'd had to see how many Styrofoam peanuts go into shipping a car.
This is actually perfect marketing for the makers of Spore. It gives them an infallible (if not logically correct) counterargument to all negative reviews.
So, EA, we hear that Spore is getting bad reviews. It must not be a good game.
Not at all. That bad review is just posted by someone who never played the game, and is trying to attack us.
And what about this other bad review?
Same thing.
And...
... buddy, any bad review you can point to is just a fake review, because Spore is AWESOME!/P
" In 2001 and 2002, British hacker Gary McKinnon gained access to Air Force, Army, Navy, NASA, Pentagon, and Department of Defense computers (97 in total) in a quest for evidence of flying saucers... Officials claim damages from his entry range close to $700,000... McKinnon is currently facing extradition to the U.S., which could mean up to 70 years in prison."
Anybody spot a GLARING, COMPLETELY LUDICROUS issue here?
Not really. He'll be serving those 70 years aboard an alien spaceship that will be moving near the speed of light. So for him, it'll only be, like, 1.5 months. And by the time he comes back, Our New Overlords will be common knowledge.
And now, because I'm bored, the article with Super Commentary!
1889 to Present - the full story
Written by: Clint McCredie | 9/5/2008 5:54:04 PM
Or, as you'll find out by the end of the article, OCR'd by Clint McCredie from a magazine he read back in 2006. And for the record, 2006 isn't "the present".
119 years have culminated in that little white box that sits beneath your TV. No bigger than a DVD case, the Wii is essentially the same machine - albeit slightly prettier and technically more robust - that Nintendo would release back in 1985.
I was going to get all grammar pedantic on Chris, but I think we've already established he has trouble differentiating the past from the present-- how could one possibly expect him to keep his tenses correct?
Here's the complete history of Nintendo.
... except for their movies, arcade "preview" of N64, any Gameboy beyond "color", sales dominance of the Wii, and.. (sigh).. well, a lot. Let's just say that there's a lot missing, and it's up to you to make your own "for certain values of complete" jokes.
1933 - Sekiryo Yamauchi establishes a joint partnership company named Yamauchi Nintendo & Co.
His partner's name? Bah. His partner was a Halo player, so fuck him with a power glove!
1963 -... However, Nintendo's toy division begins to show promise when one of its employees, Gunpei Yokoi, creates the Ultra Hand and it proves a huge success.
And that, folks, is how Mario improves your sex life.
1975 - Yamauchi-san negotiates a deal...
Whoa, what's with the switch from history documentary neutral to buddy-film "san"? Remember folks, Spay Your Catgirl!
1977 - Nintendo launches its first home videogame system: the Colour TV Game 6. It contains six variations of Pong and is later succeeded by the Colour TV Game 15. The machines are only released in Japan.
Six variations? How the hell do you get SIX variations of Pong. All I know is that there's Pong, and there's Pong Kombat.
1985 - Yamauchi decides to rejig the internal structure of Nintendo and split its internal development teams into four groups: R&D1, R&D2, R&D3 and R&D4.
As a special bonus, today is Multiple Joke Choice day:
1 - The fifth group, R2&D2, were looked for. Although they thought they'd found them, it turns out it wasn't the group they were looking for.
2 - Rejig-- official corporate procedure. Real Fact!
3 - Split its internal development team-- thus creating the first goatse reference.
ALT-F4 - None of the above.
Miyamoto's intention for The Legend Of Zelda was always to create a 'virtual garden', a game the player could nurture and watch blossom gradually.
1989 - Nintendo releases the Power Glove. The accessory is designed by Mattel and, similar to the Wii Remote, allows players to recreate hand movements on screen using motion sensors attached to televisions.
So, wait, I'm confused. The Power Glove was based off the Wii Remote? If Nintendo had the Wii sitting around for 17 years, why didn't they release that first? It might have been useful to the parents of the younger version of this article's author. They could have used it as a reward to get him to pay attention in grammar class.
1991 - After a collaboration with Sony to help develop a CD add-on for
For anyone thinking this was a bastion of good reporting, it isn't. It's just a reprint of an article that appeared in Ultimate Nintendo (as referenced at the end of their 8 page long, ad filled reprint)
Sorry for the self-reply, but I just RTFA, and noticed that it must have been a magazine from 2006. Because the article ends abruptly in 2006. They didn't update it or provide any original material. How non-2.0 of them! Or maybe there just wasn't any content to add. Because, after all, Nintendo hasn't done anything history-worthy since 2006.
For anyone thinking this was a bastion of good reporting, it isn't. It's just a reprint of an article that appeared in Ultimate Nintendo (as referenced at the end of their 8 page long, ad filled reprint). So, yeah, here's the FTA, and fuck Game Player:
119 years have culminated in that little white box that sits beneath your TV. No bigger than a DVD case, the Wii is essentially the same machine - albeit slightly prettier and technically more robust - that Nintendo would release back in 1985.
Don't believe us? Well we're about to take you on a whistle-stop tour through the ins and outs, highs and lows, the laughter and tears of videogames' most prolific forefather. From playing cards to Pokémon: we'll even show you how Mario can improve your sex life! Here's the complete history of Nintendo.
1889 - A card game business specialising in stylish Hanafuda (flora) cards is set up by Fusajiro Yamauchi under the name of Nintendo Koppai. The business struggles until the yakuza decide to adopt the cards for their high-stakes gambling. The yakuza would demand a new pack at the start of every game and would look to Yamauchi to supply them.
Trivia - The name Nintendo is said to mean 'leave luck to heaven'.
1907 - Nintendo Koppai partners with Japan Tobacco & Salt Corporation and becomes the first domestic Japanese supplier of Western-style playing cards.
1927 - Hiroshi Yamauchi is born in the town of Kyoto, Japan.
1929 - Fusajiro Yamauchi retires, leaving control of the business to his son-in-law, Sekiryo Kaneda (aka Yamauchi).
1932 - Hiroshi's father walks out on his mother and Hiroshi is sent to live with his grandparents, Tei and Sekiryo Yamauchi.
1933 - The stop-motion classic King Kong is released in cinemas by Universal Studios.
1933 - Sekiryo Yamauchi establishes a joint partnership company named Yamauchi Nintendo & Co.
1947 - Not long after the Second World War, Sekiryo sets up a distribution company named Marufuku Co Ltd to distribute Nintendo's Western-style playing cards.
1949 - Owing to ill health, Sekiryo retires and leaves the company to his grandson, Hiroshi Yamauchi. Hiroshi renames the company Nintendo Playing Cards Co.
1952 - Hiroshi decides to expand his business and move it to a newer premises in Kyoto, Japan. He would also begin streamlining his manufacturing plants.
1952 - Shigeru Miyamoto is born in the small town of Sonebe, outside of Kyoto in Japan.
Trivia - Nintendo was the first card manufacturer in Japan to lacquer its playing cards.
1953 - Yamauchi strikes a deal with Walt Disney that allows Nintendo to produce playing cards featuring popular Disney characters.
1963 - After raising more capital on the stock market, Yamauchi tries new ventures. Some of the least successful include instant rice, burlesque 'love hotels' and a taxi company. However, Nintendo's toy division begins to show promise when one of its employees, Gunpei Yokoi, creates the Ultra Hand and it proves a huge success.
1970 - Nintendo continues to grow within the toy market. Its next big hit is The Beam Gun: an early variation of a light-gun game co-developed by Sharp and developed by Masayuki Uemura.
Trivia - The Beam Gun made Nintendo the first company in Japan to use electronic components inside toys for children.
1973 - Nintendo adapts its Beam Gun idea into electronic Laser Skeet Shooting ranges and instals them into bowling alleys across the country.
1974 - The Beam Gun technology is used again in the arcade game Wild Gunman (which would eventually be ported to the NES and later made famous in the movie Back To The Future Part II).
Trivia - According to the screenwriter Bob Gale, on his commentary for the Back To The Future Part II DVD, the Wild Gunman arcade cab that appears in the movie was especially built for the film.
1975 - Shigeru Miyamoto graduates from the Kanazawa College of Art with a degree in Industrial Design.
...American Rights Counsel LLC sent out over 4000 DMCA takedown notices to YouTube...
... leaving them with 250,000 more to send.
I say go to it. The only way these jokers can know which videos to hit with a DMCA is to watch them. Maybe if they're exposed to anti-CoS messages enough, it'll start to crack through the brainwashing, and they'll free themselves.
So keep posting those videos, folks! It's good karma.
If people would just stop buying shit from spam emails, this wouldn't be a problem.
You're right. Spamming is easy and profitable. If you take away the easy, then it will deter some spammers, but will just encourage others to find an easier route. Spammers treat legislation like damage and route around it...
The consumers, on the other hand, are a finite resource. There's only so many of them (though it doesn't seem it). They buy stuff from spammers out of ignorance, greed, lack of fear of getting scammed/harmed, or by just being a chump.
But they wouldn't if there was enough compelling education out there to show that purchasing spammed products is harmful to your health. Think about any food recall in recent times, from e. coli tomatoes to Listeriosis contaminated deli-meats. The harm-to-humans is often very, very low-- a dozen or two at the most-- but the public reaction against the product is immediate and massive. DON'T EAT THAT MEAT! People will wrap themselves in unjustly paranoid levels of caution over what amounts to a statistically tiny chance of something happening to them.
So the trick to stopping spam is to get rid of the customers. And the trick to getting rid of the customers is to, well, get rid of them.
Legislation doesn't work because if you get rid of one spammer, ten more pop up. But it is possible to track down a spammer. Pick a few good-sized spammers. Hire a mercenary company to track them down, kill them (painfully or not, depending on your budget), and seize their customer list. Then mail out to every customer a free sample of V!@GREA. Except instead of the blue pill, you ship out blue-colored cyanide pills. Bam, hundreds to thousands of customers dead in an instant. Then you leak to the media that they were all customers of spam. Let the media hype it up in the way they do best, and within a day you'll have headlines everywhere that SPAMMERS ARE KILLING YOU AND YOUR FAMILY! Once the lowest common denominator gets wind that the magic blue pill from the internets will KILL THEM, they'll stop being customers.
No customers = no profit = no spam (or at least significantly reduced levels). You can then clean up the spam-stragglers with law enforcement and mercenary companies, as there won't be ten people waiting to pop up to replace them.
I was going to suggest the same thing. Even if you can't get webspace from your school's IT department, it'd be a trivial matter to set up a LAMP computer on your classroom's LAN and install MediaWiki on it-- or shell out ~$50 and get yourself a economy hosted website somewhere that offers a LAMP stack.
Then put up a skeleton structure for the course. Add some pages about what the course is, the curriculum and goals, time line, etc.
As each lesson comes around (or even a few in advance) post your notes to the wiki. Encourage students to elaborate or expand upon the wiki in any positive way. That can be anything from adding some links to educational sites, to updating out-of-date information, to fixing spelling & grammar.
Then, as a class project, break your class up into teams of 2-3 people. Assign each of them a course topic. Have them research the material, and for a deliverable, they need to create the wiki page for that topic. Give them some guidelines (must have 3 sources that will be [cited], must contain at least 3 useful links to other intra-wiki pages, etc). Maybe even have them present their findings. Future classes might have the same requirements, but instead must find 2 new facts about their topic that aren't currently in the wiki.
Make sure you have a nice index page, set up the Random page, and the thing will build itself. It's something that each student will have had a hand in making. Limit editing to Registered Only, and make sure you approve accounts (or pre-generate them for your students). This will cut down on vandalism. It will also give you, the person who will be grading their work, a full snapshot of who did what work, as well as a complete revision history.
At the end of the semester, not only will you have a really good completed project, but it will also be extremely useful for future classes. You effectively have all your notes created and kept in a presentable manner. You can even put it on a public-facing computer, and open it up for other classes or teachers (even those beyond your own school) to use. (You might want to limit it to a public read-only, until you are ready to release the entire project into the wild...)
Slashdot Mirror
I'm sure this will work out perfectly for them. I mean, take a look up here at Canada. Best Buy Canada is owned by Future Shop. And Future Shop opened their own digital music download store, too. It's called Bonfire, and...
Wait, what's that? Oh, okay, it wasn't really their own download store. It was just Puretracks with a custom skin on it. In any case, it blazed their trail into the future of music downloads and...
Huh? Oh. Okay, it turns out Bonfire was a massive flop and was shut down this year.
Well, in any case, I'm sure that Best Buy USA's third-party, rebranded online music store will do much better than Best Buy Canada's third-party, re-branded online music store did.
PS: To give you an idea of how well this is going to turn out, this is the same company that decided it would be a good idea to sell "branded" mp3 players. Basically it was 128MB player that "came with" a few tracks, all for the low, low price of $169. Mmm, dollar-store MP3 player with DRM'd tracks for more than the cost of an iPod. Success!
But do they put the IP Addresses through the shredder and have them taken away by a certified disposal company? Or do they just chuck them in the bin where anyone can find them by digging through a couple piles of broken chairs and crushed souls?
Those are two completely different species of fish. That's like saying "why is the iPhone so great when we already have small computers in the form of an EEE PC"
As another poster pointed out, the messages may have been mistranslated by CIA operatives. They missed some of the nuances of the original language. I think I know what they were missing: something about infliction at the start and end of the message. I can't remember exactly how it works in the original language, but I believe it translates roughly into:
Fucking child-porn causing oxygen. Every damn one of them uses it!
Not really. The point of an ad is to implant the product in people's minds, not the ad itself. Yes, the ad works, but you need to complete that sentence: "The ad is successful... at getting people to talk about the ad."
It's a fallacy to assume that the ad being well-known is directly correlated to the amount of product it will push. One of the best examples are those stupid bench ads. I'm sure you've seen it. They're on bus and park benches, and read "You just proved bench advertising works. Call us at 555-1234 to place your ad."
By reading the ad, the only thing you've proved is that there exists a subset of people in the population who read the ads. The only thing that "worked" was that you read it. Now, if you saw a bench ad for an ad company, and called them up and purchased ad space with them, THEN they can say "you just proved bench advertising works to sell product to people who read the bench ad".
So until people start buying Microsoft products and explicitly stating that they did so because of the commercial, there's no real way to prove it "worked". It's like a saying ad people have: "50% of my advertising dollars are effective. I just don't know which 50%."
Xenophilic Xantus. Tagline, you can have your Yak and fsck it too!
Unless, of course, you're Oprah
It's like the saying goes: a science fiction writer can predict the car, but might not foresee the effect it would have on teenage mating habits.
And you plan on shipping those parts using what exactly? I'm willing to be that the energy used to plant-machine the car then drive it to my house on hybrid power, and the energy used to fossil-fueled 18-wheeler ship a ton of crap to my house are at least on par-- if the latter is not even worse.
And what about packaging? Because seriously, if this is what cmos batteries take to ship, I'd had to see how many Styrofoam peanuts go into shipping a car.
This is actually perfect marketing for the makers of Spore. It gives them an infallible (if not logically correct) counterargument to all negative reviews.
So, EA, we hear that Spore is getting bad reviews. It must not be a good game.
Not at all. That bad review is just posted by someone who never played the game, and is trying to attack us.
And what about this other bad review?
Same thing.
And...
Not really. He'll be serving those 70 years aboard an alien spaceship that will be moving near the speed of light. So for him, it'll only be, like, 1.5 months. And by the time he comes back, Our New Overlords will be common knowledge.
The parents, obviously. Now they know where their starchild went.
Or, as you'll find out by the end of the article, OCR'd by Clint McCredie from a magazine he read back in 2006. And for the record, 2006 isn't "the present".
I was going to get all grammar pedantic on Chris, but I think we've already established he has trouble differentiating the past from the present-- how could one possibly expect him to keep his tenses correct?
His partner's name? Bah. His partner was a Halo player, so fuck him with a power glove!
And that, folks, is how Mario improves your sex life.
Whoa, what's with the switch from history documentary neutral to buddy-film "san"? Remember folks, Spay Your Catgirl!
Six variations? How the hell do you get SIX variations of Pong. All I know is that there's Pong, and there's Pong Kombat.
As a special bonus, today is Multiple Joke Choice day:
1 - The fifth group, R2&D2, were looked for. Although they thought they'd found them, it turns out it wasn't the group they were looking for. 2 - Rejig-- official corporate procedure. Real Fact! 3 - Split its internal development team-- thus creating the first goatse reference. ALT-F4 - None of the above.
Or rip up the garden and throw it at spiders for the money they keep inside their bellies
So, wait, I'm confused. The Power Glove was based off the Wii Remote? If Nintendo had the Wii sitting around for 17 years, why didn't they release that first? It might have been useful to the parents of the younger version of this article's author. They could have used it as a reward to get him to pay attention in grammar class.
Because the first type of suit doesn't come in child sizes
Sorry for the self-reply, but I just RTFA, and noticed that it must have been a magazine from 2006. Because the article ends abruptly in 2006. They didn't update it or provide any original material. How non-2.0 of them! Or maybe there just wasn't any content to add. Because, after all, Nintendo hasn't done anything history-worthy since 2006.
For anyone thinking this was a bastion of good reporting, it isn't. It's just a reprint of an article that appeared in Ultimate Nintendo (as referenced at the end of their 8 page long, ad filled reprint). So, yeah, here's the FTA, and fuck Game Player:
119 years have culminated in that little white box that sits beneath your TV. No bigger than a DVD case, the Wii is essentially the same machine - albeit slightly prettier and technically more robust - that Nintendo would release back in 1985.
Don't believe us? Well we're about to take you on a whistle-stop tour through the ins and outs, highs and lows, the laughter and tears of videogames' most prolific forefather. From playing cards to Pokémon: we'll even show you how Mario can improve your sex life! Here's the complete history of Nintendo.
1889 - A card game business specialising in stylish Hanafuda (flora) cards is set up by Fusajiro Yamauchi under the name of Nintendo Koppai. The business struggles until the yakuza decide to adopt the cards for their high-stakes gambling. The yakuza would demand a new pack at the start of every game and would look to Yamauchi to supply them.
Trivia - The name Nintendo is said to mean 'leave luck to heaven'.
1907 - Nintendo Koppai partners with Japan Tobacco & Salt Corporation and becomes the first domestic Japanese supplier of Western-style playing cards.
1927 - Hiroshi Yamauchi is born in the town of Kyoto, Japan.
1929 - Fusajiro Yamauchi retires, leaving control of the business to his son-in-law, Sekiryo Kaneda (aka Yamauchi).
1932 - Hiroshi's father walks out on his mother and Hiroshi is sent to live with his grandparents, Tei and Sekiryo Yamauchi.
1933 - The stop-motion classic King Kong is released in cinemas by Universal Studios.
1933 - Sekiryo Yamauchi establishes a joint partnership company named Yamauchi Nintendo & Co.
1947 - Not long after the Second World War, Sekiryo sets up a distribution company named Marufuku Co Ltd to distribute Nintendo's Western-style playing cards.
1949 - Owing to ill health, Sekiryo retires and leaves the company to his grandson, Hiroshi Yamauchi. Hiroshi renames the company Nintendo Playing Cards Co.
1952 - Hiroshi decides to expand his business and move it to a newer premises in Kyoto, Japan. He would also begin streamlining his manufacturing plants.
1952 - Shigeru Miyamoto is born in the small town of Sonebe, outside of Kyoto in Japan.
Trivia - Nintendo was the first card manufacturer in Japan to lacquer its playing cards.
1953 - Yamauchi strikes a deal with Walt Disney that allows Nintendo to produce playing cards featuring popular Disney characters.
1963 - After raising more capital on the stock market, Yamauchi tries new ventures. Some of the least successful include instant rice, burlesque 'love hotels' and a taxi company. However, Nintendo's toy division begins to show promise when one of its employees, Gunpei Yokoi, creates the Ultra Hand and it proves
a huge success.
1970 - Nintendo continues to grow within the toy market. Its next big hit is The Beam Gun: an early variation of a light-gun game co-developed by Sharp and developed by Masayuki Uemura.
Trivia - The Beam Gun made Nintendo the first company in Japan to use electronic components inside toys for children.
1973 - Nintendo adapts its Beam Gun idea into electronic Laser Skeet Shooting ranges and instals them into bowling alleys across the country.
1974 - The Beam Gun technology is used again in the arcade game Wild Gunman (which would eventually be ported to the NES and later made famous in the movie Back To The Future Part II).
Trivia - According to the screenwriter Bob Gale, on his commentary for the Back To The Future Part II DVD, the Wild Gunman arcade cab that appears in the movie was especially built for the film.
1975 - Shigeru Miyamoto graduates from the Kanazawa College
of Art with a degree in Industrial Design.
1975 - Yamauchi-san negotiates a deal with Mag
... leaving them with 250,000 more to send.
I say go to it. The only way these jokers can know which videos to hit with a DMCA is to watch them. Maybe if they're exposed to anti-CoS messages enough, it'll start to crack through the brainwashing, and they'll free themselves.
So keep posting those videos, folks! It's good karma.
You're right. Spamming is easy and profitable. If you take away the easy, then it will deter some spammers, but will just encourage others to find an easier route. Spammers treat legislation like damage and route around it...
The consumers, on the other hand, are a finite resource. There's only so many of them (though it doesn't seem it). They buy stuff from spammers out of ignorance, greed, lack of fear of getting scammed/harmed, or by just being a chump.
But they wouldn't if there was enough compelling education out there to show that purchasing spammed products is harmful to your health. Think about any food recall in recent times, from e. coli tomatoes to Listeriosis contaminated deli-meats. The harm-to-humans is often very, very low-- a dozen or two at the most-- but the public reaction against the product is immediate and massive. DON'T EAT THAT MEAT! People will wrap themselves in unjustly paranoid levels of caution over what amounts to a statistically tiny chance of something happening to them.
So the trick to stopping spam is to get rid of the customers. And the trick to getting rid of the customers is to, well, get rid of them.
Legislation doesn't work because if you get rid of one spammer, ten more pop up. But it is possible to track down a spammer. Pick a few good-sized spammers. Hire a mercenary company to track them down, kill them (painfully or not, depending on your budget), and seize their customer list. Then mail out to every customer a free sample of V!@GREA. Except instead of the blue pill, you ship out blue-colored cyanide pills. Bam, hundreds to thousands of customers dead in an instant. Then you leak to the media that they were all customers of spam. Let the media hype it up in the way they do best, and within a day you'll have headlines everywhere that SPAMMERS ARE KILLING YOU AND YOUR FAMILY! Once the lowest common denominator gets wind that the magic blue pill from the internets will KILL THEM, they'll stop being customers.
No customers = no profit = no spam (or at least significantly reduced levels). You can then clean up the spam-stragglers with law enforcement and mercenary companies, as there won't be ten people waiting to pop up to replace them.
I was going to suggest the same thing. Even if you can't get webspace from your school's IT department, it'd be a trivial matter to set up a LAMP computer on your classroom's LAN and install MediaWiki on it-- or shell out ~$50 and get yourself a economy hosted website somewhere that offers a LAMP stack.
Then put up a skeleton structure for the course. Add some pages about what the course is, the curriculum and goals, time line, etc.
As each lesson comes around (or even a few in advance) post your notes to the wiki. Encourage students to elaborate or expand upon the wiki in any positive way. That can be anything from adding some links to educational sites, to updating out-of-date information, to fixing spelling & grammar.
Then, as a class project, break your class up into teams of 2-3 people. Assign each of them a course topic. Have them research the material, and for a deliverable, they need to create the wiki page for that topic. Give them some guidelines (must have 3 sources that will be [cited], must contain at least 3 useful links to other intra-wiki pages, etc). Maybe even have them present their findings. Future classes might have the same requirements, but instead must find 2 new facts about their topic that aren't currently in the wiki.
Make sure you have a nice index page, set up the Random page, and the thing will build itself. It's something that each student will have had a hand in making. Limit editing to Registered Only, and make sure you approve accounts (or pre-generate them for your students). This will cut down on vandalism. It will also give you, the person who will be grading their work, a full snapshot of who did what work, as well as a complete revision history.
At the end of the semester, not only will you have a really good completed project, but it will also be extremely useful for future classes. You effectively have all your notes created and kept in a presentable manner. You can even put it on a public-facing computer, and open it up for other classes or teachers (even those beyond your own school) to use. (You might want to limit it to a public read-only, until you are ready to release the entire project into the wild...)
Mod me +5 or I will assassinate you. Assassinate you HARD!
My friend Stan can do it. I'll call him over.
Hey Stan, come over here.
Hey, Stan! STAN! STAN!
Ah hell, he's not coming. I guess he can't hear me. Maybe you should call him over.
Yes, that's right. I'm saying Uzbekistan!
They're not a game, just like Marget Atwood doesn't write science fiction
I dunno, but it seems to work well enough for Canadian gold-medal winning Olympians
When you play video games, sweat might get into your eyes. So don't forget to bring a towel!