Even better, make it so you start paying based on the hourly rate for the space at the moment you've reserved it.

The earthquake did no damage to the reactor.

The current reactor was designed to require active cooling as part of the shutdown cycle. The problems they are experiencing are due to the fact that the tsunami took out the back-up generators that were supplying power for the cooling pumps.

I think they may have attempted to get replacement generators on site to run the pumps but ran into issues either with the power the generators provided, connecting the generators up, or problems with the pumps themselves.

They used to be able to.
http://www.archive.org/details/Hemp_for_victory_1942_FIXED
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hemp_for_Victory

They used to be able to differentiate.
http://www.archive.org/details/Hemp_for_victory_1942_FIXED

Your post advocates a

(x) technical (x) 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
(x) No one will be able to find the guy or collect the money
(x) 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
(x) The police will not put up with it
( ) Requires too much cooperation from spammers
( ) Requires immediate total cooperation from everybody at once
(x) 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

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

( ) Sorry dude, but I don't think it would work.
(x) 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!

---

Additionally, you underestimate how difficult it would be to completely screen out every potential botnet spammer, especially with the extreme profitability of spam allowing them to masquerade as something other than a spammer. How do you propose you screen someone who wants to spend $200 a month to rent a dedicated server?

I've had that happen before, the tier 1 tech was so clueless as to why it wasn't working that he told me that the modem was broken and that I needed a new one.

I proceeded to tell him that he was an idiot and that he needed to transfer me to a tier 2 tech who might be able to actually help me.

It's not that you couldn't get the charges reversed in the US, but it's a whole lot easier to avoid the possibility of them overcharging (along with other issues, such as them leaking a copy of the database that has your account number in it) you by pushing the payments rather then letting them pull the funds from your checking account. Don't undervalue the cost of your time to deal with a company's screwups.

I don't think Vista is terrible enough to warrant that, but what's this ME that you are talking about?

This assumes that the firmware in the SAN server will let you do this. I know for a fact that Dell MD3000 and EMC AX-4 hardware will refuse to use anything but vendor branded drives with special firmwares.