I like Bill Gates but.....

[Icingsugar]

You don't need no penny a mail to stop Spam, just a simple world wide law change making unsolicited commercial email's illegal. With appropriately high penalties, it won't happen because big business controls most western governments via the stock exchanges etc.

That, and the fact that the one little backwater country that more or less deliberately creates a loophole in that web of ban laws will attract so many businesses that they can tak them a minimal rate and triple their BNP.

I read about an idea to a solution some year ago that would had at least saved it's customers from spam: You have a mail server. Only sender adresses approved by the server's users gets in.

Now, how does one get ones adress approved. Easy. One sumbits ones email adress to the server, including who the recipent is, and one hunderd dollars, paid via whatever system chosen. If the recipent approves the sender, the money, and interrest, will be returned. Otherwise, the sender has lost 100 bux.

There was probably legal issues with this, because I never heard anything else than the idea. But you have to admit that an unwanted sender would have quite some problem getting a word up.

 

[Icingsugar]

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Not only does he give enormous amounts of money he also has been a leader of ensuring that its spent wisely and actually reaches the kids. There was an article in Time a few years back about his philantropy and it pretty much said he's already the tops. He's responsible for immunizing over a billion children. Okay that's a good thing.

Sure. But does that make Bill an exceptopnally admirable person? Nopes. He can do this and still don't really give anything up.

Ted Turner donated 1 billion dollars the other year to "UN causes" (whatever that is), that was a little bit over a third of his personal wealth.

His comment to this was "I'm no poorer than I was nine months ago, and the world is much better off."

If I was the world's richest man, I could also afford to be the biggest charity donor in history. I'd make sure that I was well off for the rest of my life, and set up a good future for my children. Then give away the rest.

 

[snooper]

Let us talk logically for a few moments.

There is no world-wide government, so there is no world-wide law, and will not be such law for the forseeable future.

The internet is not simple. We all tend to think of it as:

Me-----My ISP-----"the Net"------your ISP-----you.

This is not a necessary model of the actual process. Injecting email into the system without using an ISP is possible from any node.

All email wanders round the net bearing two useful pieces of information. Its source and its destination.

Self-evidently, the email spam I receive has my address as its destination.

Most email spam comes from fake source addresses. Therefore I could eliminate a fairly high proportion of email spam by having a little programme which checks the existence of the source address and rejects anything which fails that test.

That would force the spammers to use real addresses, and then all spam I would receive would have a valid source address, which could then be used to send a polite "no thank you" note. Since spammers send out millions of emails at a time, receiving millions of polite "no thank you" notes might just stretch their resources a little.

If they used spoofed real addresses then there would be pressure on their victims to do something about it, and the spammers are always traceable by the simple process of trying to buy whatever they are selling.

 

[kellycummings]

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If I was the world's richest man, I could also afford to be the biggest charity donor in history. I'd make sure that I was well off for the rest of my life, and set up a good future for my children. Then give away the rest. [/B]

But that is exactly what Gates says he wants to do. He's not doing it all at once but I think that makes sense because charities need money at different times for different things. I'm not saying everyone should like him, a lot of people don't, but I think he's a decent man who is trying to do some good.
Not all of his ideas are worth a shit. Some just plain suck. And he can be a bit ruthless in business. Still, I've always liked him.

 

[Icingsugar]

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But that is exactly what Gates says he wants to do. He's not doing it all at once but I think that makes sense because charities need money at different times for different things. I'm not saying everyone should like him, a lot of people don't, but I think he's a decent man who is trying to do some good.
Not all of his ideas are worth a shit. Some just plain suck. And he can be a bit ruthless in business. Still, I've always liked him.

Well, yah, it's noble that he is going to give away all his money, much more kudos to him than to most gazillionaires. But not exceptionally so. He is not giving anything up. Bill may not die incomprehesively rich. But he'll liva all his life with more money than he can spend. He is a decent bloke who is very good at making business. He has built a successful enterprise that takes good care of it's shareholders and employees alike, and he is using and even moreso is going to use his own massive wealth in a responsible, sensible way to make the world a better place. What I'm saying is that he is doing what he should, what I too would do. And I'm certainly not a saint.

He still makes some bloody annoying software, though.