One of the problems with the current anti-spam environment is thatthere are not enough disincentives against doing really horriblethings , like spam, virus, and so on notificationautoresponders, or challenge response systems, or your favorite abuse.Practically speaking, people doing these things do not bear any costsfor their actions, or at least none large enough to make them noticeanything wrong.

(In fact there pretty much aren't any disincentives at the moment.There are a few blocklists of places that do bad things

In thinking more about my dislike of smooth scrolling , I think it's useful to distinguish scrollingthrough something from panning through it. The difference is thatpanning operations are a continuous process, whereas scrolling is adiscrete thing that theoretically has a specific size that it's supposedto jump.

Since panning is continuous anyways, panning operations clearly cansmooth 'scroll' without problems; it matches how people think of them tostart with. Scrolling, especially scrolling large amounts, is not likethat so (at least

In Unix, there's several ways to put processes into the background,each with its own different set of effects, because Unix processes havevarious sorts of connections to your foreground shell session: their process group , whether or not they areignoring SIGHUP signals, open file descriptors to your tty, and evenwhether or not the process has a controlling tty.

So, in order of increasing isolation, Unix has:

• simple backgrounding, where you start the program with & and theshell doesn't wait for it