The last time I looked into thunderbird 3 all the mail was no going to be stored in an mbox format and wouldn't be stored in anything close to plain text. That's a deal breaker for me. I love the ability to grep a folder or even the entire inbox. The search in thunderbird has always been lacking but no matter how much the search is improved in thunderbird 3 it can't be good enough to replace the speed and power of what can be done on the command line.

If that's still the case and I had to switch to anything I'd go back to using to fetchmail

"we'd be using our 1200bps modems connecting to the local BBS and swapping email over fido."

exactly what I did in the old days. As long as computers are around, people will find a way to connect them and connect themselves to each other using them. I suspect that while dial up might not be answer people run to these days I could see people setting up wireless networks within their own neighborhoods, and extending them into WANs that cover a good part of their city.

"I don't think they will cut off customers. It would be a huge support hassle for them. We lost connection the other day and they sent out a tech guy the next day. That can't be cheap considering they are all contractors." They shut them down already. This is just a way to cut costs by automating the notification process and giving infected customers a chance to clean up the problems themselves before they spew enough spam that a disconnection is needed. I certainly hope that they disconnect customers who neglect these notices and allow their computers to continue being used for spamming, phishing, etc. until they've re-secured their systems. I've seen ISPs doing this sort of thing via walled gardens with a lot of success, and I hope it catches on.

Can I use that excuse too? I need to evade/cheat/avoid paying my income taxes because "I can't afford to do business here anymore" either.

I'm so tired of this idea that corporations should be able to do things which would fast have me inside a jail cell if I were to try doing them myself. I also have a pretty hard time feeling sorry for giant corporations who make billions in profits each year, considering the number of other advantages, resources, support, and security they have over the rest of us. I think they'll live. Even if companies needed to pay a higher percentage of total income in taxes then most of us, it won't have as great an impact on them then it does for the average guy working a 9-5. The ones that couldn't make it if they had to start paying their "fair" share of the tax burden most likely don't deserve to continue existing anyway.

Games do well enough for now at expressing emotion within the limits of graphics/voice acting/script

What I'd like to see are:

1. controls sensitive and natural enough that your character is able to clearly express how you are feeling with no effort on your part. If it's done well how your character moves and his expression will change without you even realizing it

2. NPCs that then respond to your emotional state at the time.

I sometimes wonder if this hasn't affected me.

I've played a whole lot of adventure games and now every so often I'll see some random discarded object lying around on the ground somewhere and I get the odd feeling that if I picked it up and carried it around eventually I might figure out where I can use it for something.