Spam Assassin?
Joel Spolsky ruminates about charging a penny per e-mail, as a way to kill spam. The most interesting implication of this proposal is that it would allow spam recipients to track down spam senders (same place you send the bill). Unfortunately, that means it would never get implemented. One imagines a scene where the toady spam king waddles out onto his front porch to pick up the paper, and from the shadows leaps a spam recipient, strangle cord extended…
Or maybe I have just been playing Hit Man 2 on my Xbox too much. I hate myself when I waste time playing games, but I love this game. There is something right about a game where you have to drag the bodies out of sight, steal people’s clothes to disguise yourself, and get past guards byluring them apart and knocking them out with chloroform (then drag them somewhere quiet and shoot them with the 9mm suppressed, although I wouldn’t know about that).
The artificial intelligence of the game is amazing to me. It feels like Iam trying to outsmart real people, and not simply learning to adapt to the computer’s patterns. I suppose it is a side-effect of the game’s design more than anything: a few well-placed computer characters with relatively simpleindividual behaviors can combine into some really interesting patterns that test one’s ability to scheme and plot. After all, in real life the bouncers aren’t always that sophisticated, but still a challenge to get past.
And there are many ways to accomplish your objective on any level. I replay the levels multiple times to exercise new and craftier techniques, and I find myself dreaming about evil deeds. In the middle of reading my “Windows Shell Programming” book, an epiphany: “You couldplant a car bomb without having to kill the guards if you are dressed as the driver!” In a few minutes, I’ve fired up the Xbox and am proving my theory. They never suspected a thing…