What about random sort, where you swap 2 random values and test to see if it is sorted. I assume it would sound like static, probably white noise (as opposed to pink noise).

According to the article at the register. He included his email addres and phone while talking about how evil and vindictive he is. He either didn't have the capacity to make rational decisions or never intended to succeed. Since he was also already in debt 1.2 mil and made his demand precisely 4x his life insurance premium that he was unhappy with I'm thinking it was a little of both.

Ok, So I got a funny mod above, then I read the article. This guy is $1.2 mil in debt and was provoked by 'becoming "dissatisfied" with the performance of his own universal life insurance policy.' That's sad. But wait, theres more:

 
This man is obviously stressed out and possibly mentally ill. Still think he should go to jail though.

If I were the company, I would have hired him for PR and marketing department.

What if someone is bipolar and terminally ill?

Which begs the question: Why hasn't the US gov trademarked the Washington Monument?

Did I use "begs the question" appropriately here?

Your post advocates a
( x) technical ( ) legislative ( ) market-based ( ) vigilante

approach to fighting spam. Your idea will not work. Here is why it won’t work. (One or more of the following may apply to your particular idea, and it may have other flaws which used to vary from state to state before a bad federal law was passed.)

( ) Spammers can easily use it to harvest email addresses
( x) Mailing lists and other legitimate email uses would be affected
( ) No one will be able to find the guy or collect the money
( ) It is defenseless against brute force attacks
( ) It will stop spam for two weeks and then we’ll be stuck with it
(x ) Users of email will not put up with it
( ) Microsoft will not put up with it
( ) The police will not put up with it
( ) Requires too much cooperation from spammers
(x ) Requires immediate total cooperation from everybody at once
( ) Many email users cannot afford to lose business or alienate potential employers
( ) Spammers don’t care about invalid addresses in their lists
( ) Anyone could anonymously destroy anyone else’s career or business

Specifically, your plan fails to account for

( ) Laws expressly prohibiting it
( x) Lack of centrally controlling authority for email
( ) Open relays in foreign countries
( ) Ease of searching tiny alphanumeric address space of all email addresses
( ) Asshats
( x) Jurisdictional problems
( ) Unpopularity of weird new taxes
( ) Public reluctance to accept weird new forms of money
( x) Huge existing software investment in SMTP
( ) Susceptibility of protocols other than SMTP to attack
( ) Willingness of users to install OS patches received by email
( ) Armies of worm riddled broadband-connected Windows boxes
( ) Eternal arms race involved in all filtering approaches
( x) Extreme profitability of spam
( ) Joe jobs and/or identity theft
( ) Technically illiterate politicians
( x) Extreme stupidity on the part of people who do business with spammers
( x) Dishonesty on the part of spammers themselves
( ) Bandwidth costs that are unaffected by client filtering
( ) Outlook

and the following philosophical objections may also apply:

( x) Ideas similar to yours are easy to come up with, yet none have ever been shown practical
( ) Any scheme based on opt-out is unacceptable
( ) SMTP headers should not be the subject of legislation
( x) Blacklists suck
( ) Whitelists suck
( ) We should be able to talk about Viagra without being censored
( ) Countermeasures should not involve wire fraud or credit card fraud
( ) Countermeasures should not involve sabotage of public networks
( x) Countermeasures must work if phased in gradually
( ) Sending email should be free
( ) Why should we have to trust you and your servers?
( ) Incompatiblity with open source or open source licenses
( ) Feel-good measures do nothing to solve the problem
( ) Temporary/one-time email addresses are cumbersome
( ) I don’t want the government reading my email
( ) Killing them that way is not slow and painful enough

Furthermore, this is what I think about you:

(x ) Sorry dude, but I don’t think it would work.
( ) This is a stupid idea, and you’re a stupid person for suggesting it.
( ) Nice try, assh0le! I’m going to find out where you live and burn your house down!

Mars rover has been stuck for almost a year now I happen to agree with you though, If it does get freed it should be able to produce a LOT more scientific data.

Could you please explain the differences between evolution and chemical computation? You said that you understand the concept of prions replicating and some versions outperforming others; isn't that the very definition of natural selection? Whats missing? Just DNA?

Even for the mentally ill? One could argue that his brain simply works differently than yours or mine. I'm not saying I agree with the decision, I'm just curious where the line should be drawn.

I don't think it's over. The summary is talking about red light cameras in California, and all the comments are about Microsoft.

Well, if anyone has some modponits they dont want, have at it with "Offtopic".

If you click the comments it appears they are linked to story Microsoft Releases Prototype of Research OS Barrelfish

Are you sure? I drove a Prius last week, and I didn't notice that. I did notice that when I had the A/C on my MPG was much lower (e.g. 28MPG instead of 50MPG), and that the engine stayed on more often, but I never saw the A/C automaticallly shut itself off. That would be a strange thing for it to do, since it would be contradicting the user's wishes.

Yeah, they all run by the battery pack. From the wikipedia article:

The gasoline engine normally shuts off during traffic stops and the accessories (including the air conditioning) are powered by the battery pack.

FYI - the volt will be operating the batteries around 30 to 85 % SOC (State of Charge). Basically rechargeable batteries die faster if you charge them up to the brim and deplete them all the way. The volt could probably run closer to 60 miles on battery if you didn't mind the battery losing a big chunk of it's storage capacity in a year.

Isn't that assuming you are running at full throttle the entire trip? Think of how far you have the pedal down during your trip, probably closer to 20% average power which would raise the heater to ~6%. Then again the heating element may not need to be energized the entire duration either. In any case I would herustically guess that peripherals would run around 10%; an acceptable loss IMO.