Seriously.

I won't be buying ANY console that doesn't allow me to sell/trade/lend my games to WHOMEVER I want, for WHATEVER PRICE I want.

And frankly, I fully expect MS to get sued by various states, and possibly the feds. This is exactly the kind of "screw you" that consumers HATE. Maybe, possibly, this whole mess could finally get the Supreme Court to clarify what "first sale" rights are, and to do away with this whole bullshit of "we didn't sell you software, we just sold you a LICENSE TO USE our software".

Dowsing is crap.

You know why the "water dowsers" had higher success? Because in most places on Earth, if you dig a few feet, you will find water.

You don't need all those e-mails. Keep the few you actually care about (copy and paste the text into a regular file, and save any attachments you want), and get on with your life.

People that keep every e-mail are weird. Quit living in the past.

What do you want to learn? If you aren't a developer, or a network admin, then Linux doesn't offer for a typical desktop user. Besides frustration.

I use Linux on servers all the time on servers. It's great. But for the desktop...no. It's not worth it. Your best bet is to run Linux in a VM on a Windows box, and teach yourself how to set up a working Postfix and Apache server. That would be useful.

First, she needs to get off of XP, and off AOL.

Second, you MUST buy and install "Malwarebytes Anti-Malware". All by itself, it will stop most of the bad stuff from installing. Do this at the very least. I'd take away her administrator privileges, too.

Local school administrators are worthless pieces of shiat, that are looking to scam as much money as possible for themselves and their cronies.

I expect that nearly EVERY district is already in talks with various marketing firms about how much this data is worth.

Even if they know the list is "compromised", what are they supposed to do about it? It's already out there. Do you expect them to go after the spammers? Because that's essentially impossible. If they're not in the United States, it really *is* impossible.

That's why you haven't got a response. They know, but there's nothing they can do.

And frankly, if you had decent spam filters on your own personal domain, you probably wouldn't be seeing these emails anyway. I doubt anyone with a Gmail or Yahoo or Outlook.com address sees this stuff.

My suggestions? Quit worrying about it, and quit running your own mail server. You may think you know what you are doing, but you almost certainly don't.

Firefox uses less memory than Chrome these days.

Plus, Firefox is just as fast as Chrome, typically.

And, finally and most importantly, Firefox has a zillion useful extensions. Like NoScript and Adblock.

Chrome is fine, but I don't like how it handles tabs (I use TabMixPlus on Firefox), and I *really* hate how hard it makes it to access bookmarks. Yes, you can solve the bookmark issue with extensions, but none of them are *quite* right.

You CAN'T reject based on SPF, as you have learned. You'll lose too much valid mail.

So the best you can do is use it as part of a spam-scoring system, like SpamAssassin. Unfortunately, anti-spam systems that try to assign a "score", or try to analyze mail content, are ALSO worthless. Spammers have *completely* figured out how to get past any anti-spam system that analyzes content.

The sad fact is that the only way to effectively stop spam is to pay for an anti-spam service like Postini (which is going away, I hear), or buy something like an IronPort.

Basically, professionally-maintained, commercial blacklists are the ONLY really effective anti-spam system. If you are doing anything else, you aren't doing enough.

But you can already get cheap games on Xbox Live!. Cheap games are a reality NOW. At least, for games that aren't "AAA"-level games. Which are the kind of games the Ouya is going to get.

I think the Ouya is a neat idea, but at $100, it's too expensive for what it is. If they could get it down to $50, that would be something. That's cheap enough that it's an impulse buy. Still, I think it has a good chance of doing pretty well.

That would be a good idea. But you know why it doesn't happen?

Because the various competing "e-record" systems providers don't WANT an open standard. There is FAR more money to be made in proprietary systems, and expensive "translation layers" to talk to OTHER proprietary systems.

Basically, we don't have e-records because the healthcare system in this country is riddled with greed. Efficiency and quality are NOT a priority, and in fact, are generally DISCOURAGED.

Emacs can already make cell phone calls. It's been built-in since 1980.

He got in early on 3D graphics and had dreadlocks, which made him a darling of the "Wired" and "Mondo 2000" (remember that?) crowd.

But he is clueless.

You aren't going to make any money doing this, and it will be a time sink.

Get a Wordpress blog setup from one of the zillion different providers that offer that. Problem solved.

It's hard for me to think of any software companies that are worse at creating software that actually WORKS.

SAP and Oracle are notorious for pushing out incredibly expensive, complex products that are impossible to install and generally don't work like ANYTHING else.

SAP, especially, seems to be incapable of releasing a product without a half-dozen show-stopping bugs that require obscure workarounds that you'll only find out about by calling support. I won't even talk about the unholy mess that is SAP's support site.

There's a rule about software that people often forget, and it's this:

"Software quality is inversely proportional to cost". In other words, the more expensive a given piece of software is, the crappier it is. Oracle and SAP are the NUMBER ONE offenders in this regard.