So tonight and I was over Royal Thai, eating some dinner and watching Headline News. They had this little blurb regarding email. Apparently Bill Gates and some others are looking into taking away the free from email. They're discussing some sort of a stamp that you would purchase and this will theoretically cut down on or eliminate Spam Mail... or so they think. Now correct me if I'm wrong, but my postal mailbox is full of junk mail every day. All of this junk mail has stamps on it. In fact they buy special stamps so that they can mail in bulk. Making the public buy stamps for e-mail isn't going to cut down on Spam... it infuriates me. I watched this interview with Bill Gates once and he was asked how much a candy bar costs. He replied, " I don't know, a couple of dollars?" Or something like that. The man has no concept of money. He gives away billions of dollars a year to World Health funds. Does the man need any more money? Hey here's a fucking brilliant idea why don't you lower the price of some of your products and then maybe, I don't know, perhaps public would be willing to pay all little bit for this... but not likely. Microsoft is a company that has created a program that has become a necessity now, namely Word and Excel. Microsoft Office costs $199, as a student I can get for $99. The faculty and staff at my school can buy it for $10. If you're going to sell it to faculty and staff for $10 why does it cost $200? Here's an idea, jack up the price of the things that aren't necessities. Jack up the prices of games and hobby programs. Don't jack up prices of programs that people need to work. I guess to a degree this goes along with taxing food. Put the tax on things that we don't need. Don't put the tax on food. Every year the U.S. Postal System ups the price of stamps even more and Americans have found something that not only is faster, but is also cheaper, so what do these businesses do? They're going to come in fuck everything up by charging for stamps to stop something that won't be stopped by something as simple as an e-stamp. To me, the entire proposition semms like a move of greed rather than altruism. It's as if they don't want to go into the effort of creating a program that effectively filters Spam. To them it's easier to charge for a free service then to put in a little bit of work to keep a free service going. And who's going to get this money? Is it going to go to Microsoft? What about Yahoo!, people use that. What about my school, that's where my email is through. Who gets the tax from the stamp, the government? Great, because they haven't fucked us enough as it is in so many other ways already. Figure it out you fuckers.