What you say is true, it certainly wasn't enough to just reject 66.103.128.0/18 netblock, but work with me here: ever see Aliens 2?

Spam is like those alien eggs, which'll do the "spider wasp" thing on trapped humans, which then become full-flavored adult aliens. Adult aliens are like the spam/viral messages which make it through your spam filter: they're actively dangerous, especially to an idiot (of which there are plenty around).

McColo was like the big queen alien, in that it was a central control center and reproductive source for new waves of spam, ie, the zombie control master rather than the horde (or is a botnet a "herd"?). Killing McColo (by ejecting it into the Internet void) didn't eliminate all of the spam sources or control mechanisms, any more than killing the queen eliminated the alien threat, but it was well worth doing, regardless.

I don't have a gmail account, but the people I know who do seem to agree with you; also, to their credit, Google is quite proactive about dealing with spamming involving gmail accounts as a destination.

Anyway, if you ever administer mail systems for various companies (lets say you are a sysadmin consultant: filesharing, email, and web access are the big three of network oriented stuff -- order may vary), you'll have to deal with spam to some extent, just to have samples of spam to train stuff with, and any false positives which you ought to feed as "ham" to your Bayesian classifier (ie, gmail, SpamAssassin, bogofilter, others). But first, you should try to do cheaper things like MTA HELO-time checking (greylisting, RBLs, policy checking [ie, stuff like policyd-weight, amavisd]) first, then virus-scanning, and finally Bayesian scoring.

I fly NYC (out JFK usually, sometimes Newark) to SFO 24 times a year. Most of the non-stop flights available are Virgin America, sometimes JetBlue, Continental, or maybe AA once in a while. Virgin America has had WiFi now on all of the recent flights I've been on this year, except 1 back in Jan; JetBlue was about to add it last time I was on (maybe Feb?). This route is mostly flown by AirBus 319/320s, or less commonly by Boing 757 or modern 737-800 models (which have extended fuel tanks in the wing pylons, IIRC, to make the ~2500 trip without refueling; older 737's don't have the range).

There are roughly 150 - 200 people on these planes; I think the going rate for WiFi access is ~ $8.99 (although free in 1st class, if the carrier does that; ie, not JetBlue). Assume 50 people use it per flight, thats $450 per flight, times three possible flights the plane could take this route in a 24-hour period. $1350/day? I get a break-even for cost around 150 days, assuming the $200K install cost per plane comes with a year's worth of network access?

Gah. I remember dealing with PICK also; it's used in a bunch of airline reservation and courier/package delivery systems. You deal with this beast in something resembling BASIC, rather than in SQL, and you'll quickly discover that all it supports is unary and binary operations: no operator precedence, no parenthesises, and not even compound statements. No equivalent of JOIN, no notion of atomic commits, no transaction model, logging, or rollback, etc.

Think of Berkeley DB 1.x, or early versions of MySQL which only had the MyISAM storage type, and then remove the C or SQL-based API and replace it with a crippled BASIC variant instead, and you've got something pretty close to PICK. Basically, all you get is a filesystem with data kept in hash tables, maybe with a B-tree index added for newer versions of PICK. To do anything beyond the trivial with it, you end up doing all of the heavy lifting on the client side.

Anybody remember DeMorgan's laws? Well, if you want to use PICK you'd better, because to do:

RESULT = NOT (A or B)

You end up having to do three separate statements:

C = NOT A
D = NOT B
RESULT = C AND D

The machine names you might pick for your own home LAN are going to be very different than the ones a network admin overseeing something like multiple data centers would.

For the first case, I go for "short and distinctive", something less than 5 chars if at all possible: pi, tau, mini, oz, iota, pong, shot, etc. For the datacenter or multiple-DC situation, you'll end up with a naming convention typically starting with location, then a group or owner name, then possibly something chosen by the machine's owner or perhaps just a number....

+1 Karma for paying for the software once you decided you liked them.

Capships which can heal other capships are a major help to your vital capships' lifespan. The other important point to note is that staying in the sector with the star greatly speeds up the regeneration rate of blue energy, which means all of your capship special powers are more rapidly available.

If you can get to the star after a big fight, the next wave of enemy ships trying to slaughter your weakened ships won't find an easy target, and you can lure enough of the enemy's fleet to you if you can hold on, that you can often take out another enemy planet before they can rebuild and regroup.