Does anyone know how many users we're talking about, and how much administrative time?

Can you imagine what kind of 'schemes' or 'shared goals' the trolls would be posting, without administrative monitoring?

I can already imagine the kiddies posting goals like "Go on a shooting spree," and every sort of criminal and racist objective in the book. And of course spammers......

Without substantial resources spent on moderation, it would be likely to degenerate into an internet cesspool, that makes Google+, Twitter, Facebook, Wikipedia and Slashdot look like Utopia.

So sorry. We don't even have the Concorde anymore and I'm supposed to cheer for the thrill rides of people who've somehow managed to game the system to make money while my real wages have been going down for 10 years?

These things give us an opportunity and means to redress the balance, and relieve them of their dubiously-gotten gains. Their decadence today will pay for (a small bit of) progress.

Now all we need to do is to think of other ways to part them from their loot so that more of us can benefit...

Suborbital flight. If you go high enough (c.f. SpaceShip Two) where the air is very thin indeed you can then accelerate to much higher speeds than are possible where the air is thicker (lower down). Then you can fall back down into the air, slow down and land like a plane when you get near your destination. Flying at 15 to 25 times the speed of sound becomes feasible.

I think the point being made is that if SapceShip Two is popular and makes a big profit, there might be money to invest is a sub-orbital liner version for intercontinental travel.

People have imagined such things since the 1930s (first for weapons delivery i.e. Slibervogel/Amerikabomber) but it's been prohibitively expensive so far.

Unfortunately, that often doesn't work. Many places require specifying personal details in order to do a password reset. If they need a real name or postal code, or whatever, I'm screwed. Oftentimes you can't even unsubscribe from their fucking spam list without logging in first.

Many might, most do not. It depends on if you think you signed up for the service, or you are just getting annoying emails from the service and want them to stop.

You can expeditiously address the spam list issue by setting a mail filter to discard the sender, or you may write to them to communicate the issue and get support.

Also, contacting their abuse department and/or their ISPs abuse department generally works pretty well.

If you have to login or supply extra information in order to opt-out of regular emails, then their service is in criminal non-compliance with the CAN-SPAM act; a visible and operable unsubscribe option must be included for all e-mails, In addition: name, email, and postal address of the sender must be included, and requests to opt-out, must be honored within no more than 10 days, whether the request is through the unsubscribe option, or by writing to the sender.

School? Yes! Non-reversible surgical procedure, dictated by religion that is backed by state-enforcement? No!

Theocracy in action. "Western" country my arse!

It must be this little fact that accounts for the high divorce rate. It's the French, who fuck with their faces, and fight with their feet... ;-)

EXTINCT

In fact, I would consider becoming vegan.

Except for weasels...

Damned weasels! Eating's almost too good for 'em!

"Never use a catchall."

Your "bad situations" are easily controlled automatically with spam filters such as spamassassin. The positives of giving every website a unique email, so you can easily see when a website has had their shit hacked, far outways any backscatter problems. You can also tweak the delays on your mailserver which breaks or slows down many common spamming tools.

Another benefit is that i can easily block some company from ever emailing me again but blocking their company specific email addres I have created.

Actually, the problem with IP is the TTL and Timeouts that are configured. a ttl of 255 seconds is built into IP, (and any protocol riding on IP like UDP) which means that the packet is considered dead after 255 seconds (or the combination of x seconds and y hops adding up to 255.) Switching to IPv6 does not help, as the only significant change to the field is the name, where it changed from Time To Live to Hop Limit. It is still an 8 bit field, meaning it is a maximum of 255. If the protocol when switching to solar system communications changes to purely hop limit, and stops decrementing the counter each second, you may be able to get away with it, but you will have a large legacy of implementation of protocols on top of IP that rely on this that will essentially be broken as a result.

The suggestion of DecNet was specifically make use of timeout value in the DecNet protocol. Using a connectionless protocol on top of it seems reasonable to me, but I would actually be OK with almost any protocol that would not expire packets in transit and start trying to saturate the bandwidth with retransmittions.

Yes, to some degree a single satelite solution would be possible. It would work best as a solution for mars if it were to orbit the sun perpendicular to the earth-moon line at opposition, with an eliptical orbit with a period such that at opposition, the satelite would be either as far north of the sun as the orbit would allow, or as far south.

I would still argue for relays at L4 and L5, but then there are more than a few people interested in setting up stations there anyway. Possibly easier to establish would be a sun-earth l4/l5 pair (vs. the traditional earth-moon lagrange points) as just those two should give sufficient spread to se around the sun, without being incapable of being repaired easily.

I wonder what the legal implications of this is...

There's not any legal recourse you are going to be able to pursue against them for entering your email address by honest mistake.

They were negligent in making a typographic error, but they do not have a duty of care towards you in that regard. You need evidence of intentional malice.

" A ten year old Windows XP machine can run all the latest browsers,"

Have you even managed/used XP? It is incapable of running even IE 9 which is 3 years old.
http://windows.microsoft.com/en-CA/internet-explorer/products/ie-9/system-requirements

I of course agree that apple obsoletes everything too quickly, but now is time for xp to die. Power PCs death was quite a few years ago now.

Just ignore them, or block the sender.

To make matters worse, I frequently find I can't use my email to create a new account at various sites because it's already been registered.

In that case, use an e-mail based password reset, set a new password, and done, as far as having registered for the site, or contact the site's support.