You seem to think that the 'spam problem' is technological. It's not. You remember getting junk mail in your snail-mail box, right? Same concept. There is a medium through which many potential customers can be reached, and is cheaper than the alternative (for paper mail, it's cheaper than going door-to-door, for e-mail, it's cheaper than paper mail).

Even if sender and receiver are authenticated properly, so what? A spammer will still be able to 1)forge his own authentication or 2)compromise an authentic box and use that as a zombie spam machine.

The only even faintly possible way to stop all spam would be to have all email pass through a single point, where spam could be stopped. However, that is nearly impossible considering the already widespread and deeply entrenched SMTP, and the fact that getting net users to agree to let a single company read every single email they ever send to anyone ever will be nigh impossible.

The spam problem is human. There is money to be made in spam, and in email spam, the profit margin is fucking massive. To kill spam, you must remove the monetary benefit, but the profit margin is so large, you don't really have much hope trying to cut that down to where spam doesn't pay.

I wish I had mod points. The people that pull the decimate line piss me off so incredibly much.

If there are eyes looking at it, someone somewhere will find a way to turn it into a money-machine. Newspapers, radio (figurative eyes, of course), TV, email, blogs, and now twitter/pownce/jaiku/whatever. Why are we so fucking surprised?

I think that's kinda the point. I can post to twitter "My boy turns 2 today" and everyone who's listening can know, without having to explicitly ask me how old my kid is.

It is with great sorrow that I admit I read that as "sow hat" and was very confused. Today is not my day.

Yes, but Steam has assured us that in the eventuality of their auth servers going down, they'd give us ways to continue playing.

Also, any computer than can run the Steam client can install and play any game you've purchased via Steam. An unlimited number of installs, without the need to authenticate, then deauthenticate as you install on a new system.

Yes, it's DRM, in a technical sense, but in a practical sense, it's almost a liberating as owning a 100% un-DRMed game CD that does not do disk checking.

I would LOVE to have all my games on the Steam machine, because then I wouldn't have to dick around with saving CDs or installers.

Seriously. It didn't involve a car at all. Are you new here?