Stepping in Line with Shiva (A mass of discorded) - Perpetual Indefinite Growth of the Subordinant

OH EM GEE! Hath it trully been such a long time since myself and good mister blog sat down to our evening cup of tea? And on remembering I have a blag, I note no entried in October. How sad.. I am trully apologetic for this.

As a quick note, before todays main topic. Yes I did consume your souls upon halloween. It didn't please my appetite very much. But I thought you could do with a munchle.
Secondly should be noted is that today marked the beginning of the 2009 N.S.W. school certificate. Todays was the english exam first, from 9:20 until 11:30, consisting of 45 multiple choice, 6 short answer and two long answer responses. My creative story was about a set of keys that change the flow of time, transport you to different places, change colours and one key that allowed the main character to enter his own mind. Science was also today, after feeding upon a large double quarter pounder I went into the hall to do 50 multiple choice, 10 single word responses and 8 other long question sets. I know I got one question wrong. I said 5.2V, where the answer was 6V. Stupid Nathan. Ah well.

Now. For my main topic today. This extremely annoying spam e-mail people have been sending around for ages. Today, I would like to explain why it is stupid.

I will now copy the entire e-mail into the blog, for later refference.

Hi,
This is Tara and John, the directors of MSN,

Sorry for the interruption but MSN is closing down. This is because too many inconsiderate people are taking up all the name (e.g. Making up lots of different accounts for just one person, etc.), we only have 578 names left. If you would like to close your account, DO NOT SEND THIS MESSAGE ON. If you would like to keep your
Account, then SEND THIS MESSAGE TO EVERYONE ON YOUR CONTACT LIST. This is no
joke, we will be shutting down the servers.
Send it on, thanks.

P.S.
WHO EVER DOES NOT SEND THIS MESSAGE, YOUR ACCOUNT WILL BE CLOSED AND IT WILL COST YOU 10.00 A MONTH TO USE. SEND THIS TO EVERYONE ON YOUR CONTACT LIST. NOW YOU
KNOW WHAT TO DO. PLEASE DO NOT FORWARD THIS or REPLAY. COPY THE WHOLE EMAIL.
GO BACK TO YOUR INBOX AND CLICK ON NEW. AND PASTE THANK YOU FOR YOUR
ATTENTION.

This is no joke if you don't believe us then go to this site:
http://news.BBC.co.UK/1/hi/business/1189119.stm
and see for yourself. Anyways once you've sent this message to at least 18 contacts, your MSN icon will become blue. Please copy and paste don't forward because people wont read

Now that thats over with. Here are problems with it. In the opening line, it mentions Tara and John as the directors of MSN. MSN simply put is Microsoft Network. Which is directed by many more people than just two. Directors In Microsoft Named John results in four names. Two of which are regional directors, nothing important, and one who is an engineer for microsoft. John Richards however, is a director of "Windows Live Platform." I have found no mention of a Tara so far as a director, other than in south west european countries. I should also note that John Richards was the name of a judge who worked on the Salem Witch Trials.

Now to the more obvious things. For starters. When it says people are taking up all the usernames. Excluding asian characters, there are 1401 characters that may be used in making your e-mail. Thus if someone uses just 5 characters in creating their e-mail address, there will be 5,397,475,459,607,001 possibilities. When creating your e-mail with hotmail, you also have a choice of three domains. So using only five characters in your e-mail address there are 16,192,426,378,821,003 possibilities. I personally have 12 characters in my e-mail address, and surfing through my contacts I see the average person has at least 10 characters.

If the maximum number of characters that could be used in an e-mail were 10, the formula for how many e-mails could be made would be

[if y = 1401] (y^10+y^9+y^8+y^7+y^6+y^5+y^4+y^3+y^2+y^1)X3 which =
87,460,651,314,044,548,207,815,130,431,030 e-mail addresses.
According to US statistic, on the 9th of November 2009 (today) the worlds population is 6.796 billion, 6,796,000,000 people. This equates to 12,869,430,740,736,396,145,941 e-mail accounts per person. And thats if everyone in the world had an internet connection. Where as only about 10% of the world does.

If a person used only the 26 english alphabetic letter, including upper and lower case, making 52 characters, 4,338,288,417,226,779,052 e-mail addresses are possible. If everyone in the world had internet connection, this is 63,835,909 e-mail addresses per person. I personally don't have that many addresses. If people are making many accounts, the most I know anyone to have made is the same person made 6 accounts. For exagerations sake, lets say everyone in the world has ten e-mail addressed. This would still leave, using only the english alphabet, 4,338,288,349,266,779,052 e-mail accounts unused. This means you would still have a 99.9999984% chance that the combination of letters you want to use hasn't been used yet.

My second argument is that msn already monitors if people are using there accounts depending on how long it has been since they signed in (60 days and your account gets deleted).

Thirdly, if they charged all their customers $10US a month to use msn services, they would become the richest company in 2 years.

Fourthly and most importantly, it says you must copy and paste it into a new e-mail, but it also infers through it that it will detect your account is active by some form of marker attatched to the e-mail. This would not be carried across if you simply copied all the text. Thus, my point is proven. IT'S STUPID.