thats hilarious

no way dude... its way too advanced

bah... theres more cruel and twisted people out there

that bastard
i have aladdin, mario kart AND dk3... but they aint for sale.. sorry..
i like 'em too much

played mario kart
slept

have you ever tasted pig?

you ARE miss piggy
oooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooh

[ www.cnn.com ]

Gates: Buy stamps to send e-mail
Paying for e-mail seen as anti-spam tactic
Friday, March 5, 2004 Posted: 11:25 AM EST (1625 GMT)

NEW YORK (AP) -- If the U.S. Postal Service delivered mail for free, our mailboxes would surely runneth over with more credit-card offers, sweepstakes entries, and supermarket fliers. That's why we get so much junk e-mail: It's essentially free to send. So Microsoft Corp. chairman Bill Gates, among others, is now suggesting that we start buying "stamps" for e-mail.

Many Internet analysts worry, though, that turning e-mail into an economic commodity would undermine its value in democratizing communication. But let's start with the math: At perhaps a penny or less per item, e-mail postage wouldn't significantly dent the pocketbooks of people who send only a few messages a day. Not so for spammers who mail millions at a time.

Though postage proposals have been in limited discussion for years -- a team at Microsoft Research has been at it since 2001 -- Gates gave the idea a lift in January at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland. Details came last week as part of Microsoft's anti-spam strategy. Instead of paying a penny, the sender would "buy" postage by devoting maybe 10 seconds of computing time to solving a math puzzle. The exercise would merely serve as proof of the sender's good faith.

Time is money, and spammers would presumably have to buy many more machines to solve enough puzzles. The open-source software Hashcash, available since about 1997, takes a similar approach and has been incorporated into other spam-fighting tools including Camram and Spam Assassin.

Meanwhile, Goodmail Systems Inc. has been in touch with Yahoo! Inc. and other e-mail providers about using cash. Goodmail envisions charging bulk mailers a penny a message to bypass spam filters and avoid being incorrectly tossed as junk. That all sounds good for curbing spam, but what if it kills the e-mail you want as well?

Consider how simple and inexpensive it is today to e-mail a friend, relative, or even a city-hall bureaucrat. It's nice not to have to calculate whether greeting grandma is worth a cent. And what of the communities now tied together through e-mail -- hundreds of cancer survivors sharing tips on coping; dozens of parents coordinating soccer schedules? Those pennies add up.

"It detracts from your ability to speak and to state your opinions to large groups of people," said David Farber, a veteran technologist who runs a mailing list with more than 20,000 subscribers. "It changes the whole complexion of the net."

Goodmail chief executive Richard Gingras said individuals might get to send a limited number for free, while mailing lists and nonprofit organizations might get price breaks.

But at what threshold would e-mail cease to be free? At what point might a mailing list be big or commercial enough to pay full rates? Goodmail has no price list yet, so Gingras couldn't say. Vint Cerf, one of the Internet's founding fathers, said spammers are bound to exploit any free allotments.

"The spammers will probably just keep changing their mailbox names," Cerf said. "I continue to be impressed by the agility of spammers." And who gets the payments? How do you build and pay for a system to track all this? How do you keep such a system from becoming a target for hacking and scams?

The proposals are also largely U.S.-centric, and even with seamless currency conversion, paying even a token amount would be burdensome for the developing world, said John Patrick, former vice president of Internet technology at IBM Corp.

"We have to think of not only, let's say, the relatively well-off half billion people using e-mail today, but the 5 or 6 billion who aren't using it yet but who soon will be," Patrick said.

Some proposals even allow recipients to set their own rates. A college student might accept e-mail with a one-cent stamp; a busy chief executive might demand a dollar.

"In the regular marketplace, when you have something so fast and efficient that everyone wants it, the price goes up," said Sonia Arrison of the Pacific Research Institute, a think tank that favors market-based approaches.

To think the Internet can shatter class distinctions that exist offline is "living in Fantasyland," Arrison said. Nonetheless, it will be tough to persuade people to pay -- in cash or computing time that delays mail -- for something they are used to getting for free.

Critics of postage see more promise in other approaches, including technology to better verify e-mail senders and lawsuits to drive the big spammers out of business.

"Back in the early '90s, there were e-mail systems that charged you 10 cents a message," said John Levine, an anti-spam advocate. "And they are all dead."



--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Copyright 2004 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.

no one has spoken aramaic for well over 1300 years
there were a few translators that told them what the words meant and tehre were speach therapists who taught them how to pronounce the words...
they paid much moolah to have experts translate and entire script into aramaic
the latin was mucho easier

k cool

nobody
its a dead language
maybe 2-3 people on EARTH

wow
that's all... wow

gettin' some...thing

*vomits*

saw Starsky and Hutch
went to a motel with 2 girls... haha
went home

it was fantastic...
and it's in Aramaic (a dead language that's practically indeciphrable) latin (another dead language) and hebrew...
with english subtitles

it wasn't creepy

ha

God was jewish?
no Jesus was born jewish

shit... i soooo didnt see you
all i remember was being surrounded by black people and this old couple that kept giving me dirty looks when i made jesus jokes

[ www.. ] fine.. but they were innocent of his death.
or at least Pontius Pilate was... the soliers were just doing their jobs.. they had no idea who he was
(yes... thats right... defending my roots...)

really?
I seriously thought I heard someone saying my name. I even asked my friends if they heard it.. but they didnt

I was wearing 70s cop glasses too... it was great

that's very interesting, but it's really nothing new. The US has been doing it for years, as you pointed out.
But I don't understand this whole thread. Is it just a news flash of current affairs or were you making some point?
(just asking)

yeah.. cuz ian cant spell anyway

Catholic
and I love it

Yes I did... at sources?

I killed some jews today to vindicate my Lord.
Damn Christ killers.
That movie (The Passion of the Christ) gave me a whole new perspective on life.

im a math geek... math makes me come

actually... i guess that would mean i have a math fetish then... and am not a geek

im hurt Amanda...
im hurt

...I saw someone from ravewave so I have to make a thread about it. (I wouldn't have because it's only Amanda... but then she'd get pissed and feel left out or something... oh geez... women... haha jokes)

I saw Amanda the other day at Dawson. She was walking over to a table at the food court in Alexis Nihon. She waved at me. It was the greatest moment of my life. Well maybe not my life, but definitely that hour.

mission accomplished

dont you mean: "I got my ass whooped at *insert videogame name here*" is a code-word for "I was playing videogames against a hot guy with a huge packeag and spent too much time staring at his crotch that I couldn't conentrate on playing."

i want one

I can tell that we are going to be friends

yeah... i know... im ... weird today

buh... stopped my friend from killing some guy from saskatoon

i sooooo wanna touch all three of you

*sigh* ... her

... There's a chance we can make it now
We'll be rocking till the sun goes down!!!

wow... thaqt metro station is like 10 times bettter now..

women