Feb 15th

Have been comparing the number of languages provided by hotmail, rediff, yahoo and gmail....
Impressive that rediff has atleast 11 languages....
http://www.medianama.com/2009/07/223-the-new-rediffmail-minimalist-text-ads-no-indian-languages/

Once upon a time we had to use external services such as these to keep the junk away,
http://wiki.junkemailfilter.com/index.php/Email_Users_Guide
now what a marvel we have I say!

Once upon a time when emails used to get clogged up with spam bouncing off real mail! wow isnt it cool now where we have reached!
http://www.junkemailfilter.com/spam/how_it_works.html...here Span assassin is trying to do a 'batter' job!!
I am sure students by the end of the year the ppt I am making will be outdated....for right now its this table I have depended on ...http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_webmail_providers

have been holding the bull of the unwilling table created in excel to enter its pen in the ppt, but Boy it wont cooperate!!!
Just discovered I am not alone with this problem...warm hug to google my friend..Hope I will hit on the solution soon.
http://qa.openoffice.org/issues/show_bug.cgi?id=45923


I feel numbed by the shootings at colleges, However this dean puts it in perspective #

"It's about someone who came unhinged and committed a horrible crime, and about the losses of several innocent people."
http://www.insidehighered.com/blogs/confessions_of_a_community_college_dean/thoughts_on_the_alabama_shooting
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Columbine_High_School_massacre
'On the fifth anniversary of Columbine, the FBI's lead Columbine investigator and several psychiatrists went public with their conclusions in a news article.[33] There they argued Harris was a clinical psychopath and Klebold was depressive. They believed the plan was masterminded by Harris, who they thought had a messianic-level superiority complex and hoped to illustrate his massive superiority to the world.'
'As they got into trouble, the two teenagers started to get their computer access restricted. Jerald Block believes that anger that was being projected into the games was now unleashed into the real world. In addition, the computer restrictions opened up substantial amounts of idle time that would have otherwise gone towards their online activities. They increasingly used that time to express their anger and their antisocial tendencies likewise increased. This, in turn, generated more restrictions. Finally, after being arrested and banned from their computers for about a month, the two teens became homicidal and began documenting plans to attack the school.'
does labelling them psychopaths answer the question, I am afraid no.
http://www.slate.com/id/2099203/

nd from that to this, rights for our online avatars...
http://www.raphkoster.com/gaming/playerrights.shtml

'that by the act of affirming membership in the community within the virtual space, the avatars form a social contract with the community, forming a populace which may and must self-affirm and self-impose rights and concomitant restrictions upon their behavior. That the nature of virtual spaces is such that there must, by physical law, always be a higher power or administrator who maintains the space and has complete power over all participants, but who is undeniably part of the community formed within the space and who must therefore take action in accord with that which benefits the space as well as the participants, and who therefore also has the rights of avatars and may have other rights as well.'
'Liberty consists of the freedom to do anything which injures no one else including the weal of the community as a whole and as an entity instantiated on hardware and by software; the exercise of the natural rights of avatars are therefore limited solely by the rights of other avatars sharing the same space and participating in the same community. These limits can only be determined by a clear code of conduct.'
'# The code of conduct shall provide for such punishments only as are strictly and obviously necessary, and no one shall suffer punishment except it be legally inflicted according to the provisions of a code of conduct promulgated before the commission of the offense; save in the case where the offense endangered the continued existence of the virtual space by attacking the hardware or software that provide the physical existence of the space.'
must add a quote of a quote.
"You just defined "the aim of virtual communities." That's not liberating, that's severely limiting! The beauty of virtual communities is their ability to be whatever we want them to be.
# What about a virtual world for psych experiments? Or one which is not open to the public? Or one which is solely for the admin's amusement?

# Who gets to define hurtful?

# You just made admins immune from harm. This means that they are not part of the community and subject to the same things as everyone else. This means this document vanishes in a poof of logic and doesn't exist. QED.
Who decides what contributions are worthy?

What about virtual meeting places for businesses, or online universities. I'd argue that the need for rights applies even more in such environments. But it is clear that there's a sliding scale of applicability here. It raises the question of what a mud is for, and what lifecycle it has. Common wisdom has it that "a mud must grow, or stagnate and die." If so, then the common good means anything that works against increasing the population of a mud. However, a mud that grows into something which all of its members despise is not developing towards the common good. So a better definition might be, the common good is that which increases the population of a mud without surrendering core social tenets or mores. But that word "stagnate" is in that bit o' common wisdom too. So it may be good for a mud to evolve its core social tenets in order to adapt to the changing population. Free immigration means that this will be accelerated--note that nowhere does the document say that you can't simply not accept people into the mud who aren't aligned with the mud's key social tenets."

# "Hurting others" needs to be defined in the code of conduct."