Rape jokes. Stopped reading.
If Hotmail was a person it could have kids now. But it would be a crime
It's a slow day on the tech-news desk in the temporary Olympic capital of the world, London. But, with proper IT news being in short supply, more than one starving blogger has been forced to resort to writing a "my first pony" story about Hotmail, now that it's turning into Outlook.com. We take you now to a newsroom not far …
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Wednesday 1st August 2012 16:53 GMT That Awful Puppy
In my unfortunately very limited experience in such matters, the 15 minutes include the disengagement of the bra strap, frantic attempts at the removal of the belt, the "did I put it on the right way around" meditation, as well as the post-coital "I need to say something cool now" deliberation. As to the 2 minutes 7 seconds, well, you, sir, are a stud among men.
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Wednesday 1st August 2012 20:31 GMT Mike Flugennock
remove statutory rape jokes...
...and you'd destroy a huge swath of modern humor, along with at least half the rock'n'roll and blues songs ever written.
Good thing that, say, Groucho Marx isn't still around to hear people bitching about underage sex jokes. In one of the Marx Brothers' movies, Groucho's character was named S. Quentin Quayle -- a play on the expression "San Quentin Quail", a regional slang term for promiscuous underage girls.
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Wednesday 1st August 2012 15:25 GMT Anonymous Coward
It wasn't a joke about rape, it was just an elaborate way of saying 15 years of age- ie, biologically old enough to procreate but not old enough for their consent to sexual intercourse to be considered legal in this country at this time; hence it is 'rape' by default. At no point did the article refer to the horrendous act of an individual forcing their will upon another that so rightly disgusted you.
In reality, those in authority - teachers, health workers and a fair few parents- accept that teenagers will be teenagers and so provide education and contraceptives to minimise the harm of what they see as being common. Highs and lows and mistakes and tears and elation are all a part of being a teenager.
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Wednesday 1st August 2012 18:17 GMT Anonymous Coward
You either
know some surprisingly young grandparents or everyone you know people has actually done the unusual and made "just say no" abstinence actually work.
I have friends whose children probably 'don't'' but I am sure that I have many more friends whose children probably 'do' and have been taught appropriate behaviour. We can only say "probably" in both cases because teenagers appreciate some privacy, even when they 'don't'.
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Wednesday 1st August 2012 20:07 GMT Anonymous Coward
Optional
I would have considered appallngly poor parenting had my daughter not been completely aware of the prevention available to her as a teenager (before he was 15 in fact). I have no idea when her "debut" was, but I know with a very high level of certainty that she will have done it were her eyes wide open. Then again, I am not an prude, nor do I live in a society that attempts to hide the biological reality behind religious crap and or self righteous "think of the children" bullshit.
Teenagers get horny, they can't help it, and they do what they do. Our job as parents is to ensure that they do so with the best possible understanding of what is going on.
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Thursday 2nd August 2012 11:43 GMT Anonymous Coward
re: "Can't say i know many parents who provide 'contraceptives' to their 15 year old children"
Then you'd be moving in weird religious circles who believe that self-delusion is more important than sexual health and life chances in general?
Teenagers want to have sex- we're almost advanced enough as a society to admit this to ourselves now, and no amount of sanctimonious neo_Victorian twaddle will stop them. Taking that as a given, preventing spread of nasties (chlamydia is surprisingly prevalent amongst teens and young adults, for example) and teenage pregnancy, and teaching responsible attitudes to contraception seems like the only pragmatic and mature response.
Sticking your fingers in your ears and going "la la la, I can't hear you" puts you on a similar rung of the evolutionary ladder to George W. Bush.
Try and remember what it was like being a teenager, and how you were a seething mass of confusion and desire. Unless you're completely dead inside, or an utter hypocrite, it shouldn't be easy to understand.
(Yeah, I am an old git, but I still remember how it felt, and to be honest, haven't really got over it- it makes for a happier life. The difference now is that I don't want to do anything with a pulse, and just prize my partner as the utterly brilliant being she is, which is progress, I suppose)
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Wednesday 1st August 2012 20:46 GMT Anonymous Coward
Health Workers minimise harm?
"those in authority - teachers, health workers and a fair few parents- accept that teenagers will be teenagers and so provide education and contraceptives to minimise the harm of what they see as being common"
They may be physically capable of sexual intercourse but that don't mean they are mature enough to make such decisions, but then again, neither are most of their parents. link.
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Wednesday 1st August 2012 21:14 GMT Mike Flugennock
Re: Health Workers minimise harm?
They may be physically capable of sexual intercourse but that don't mean they are mature enough to make such decisions, but then again, neither are most of their parents. link.
Y'know, being from the Colonies, I'm not really up on British social/cultural types, but that sketch is still hilarious. "Oi, look, dey got kiddie porn in 'ere!" D'ahh ha ha ha ha ha.
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Wednesday 1st August 2012 16:16 GMT xperroni
Re: My bride uses hotmail...
As her one and only e-mail account. No, really.
Actually there's a lot of people who got a Hotmail account so they could sign in to MSN Messenger * and kinda stuck to it, even long after instant messaging lost its cool. So I guess tying services together really does work?
* I know, you don't really need a Hotmail account to get to Messenger, but MS does everything it can to make it look like you do.
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Wednesday 1st August 2012 17:00 GMT mrobaer
Re: My bride uses hotmail...
My Hotmail account is my primary email also. I'm not even sure why I signed up back in '97 for email with Hotmail instead of somewhere else, but I know for sure it wasn't for Messenger.
I've had "throwaway" accounts at Lycos, yahoo, mail.com, and a few other places. I have found Hotmail to actually keep the most spam out of my inbox.
I've been using it for so long because I move around a lot and I changes internet providers almost yearly, making the Hotmail account the most stable email I have.
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Wednesday 1st August 2012 16:05 GMT Anonymous Coward
Hmm,
I too have used hotmail since day 1. I use it as my primary email address and and have never had any issues with it.
Frankly, i hope thay dont piss around with it. It stores my reg codes, some rare and difficult to find programs so they are always available to me. Sort of like livedrive or "the cloud" but better IMHO.
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Wednesday 1st August 2012 16:17 GMT Whitter
Cuts both ways.
Use of Hotmail: to avoid spam from a website
Reason the website asked: to avoid spam from you*
Given how easily bots can sign-up to hotmail, yahoo, mailinator etc, many such websites now ban new entries using an email from the main "disposable" email sites, as it defeats their purpose for asking in the first place.
*OK, some of them do just sell on your details - but not all. An email address really isn't worth much.
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Wednesday 1st August 2012 23:03 GMT Tim Worstal
Re: "Well, it's 15 years old, so Hotmail could totally procreate."
Legal in Portugal.
14 for the laydeez here.
Which produces some amusement when friends bring their children out.
Sure, every father is happy enough to see his 14, 15 year old daughter flirting a bit around the pool table in the local taverna while parentals get a couple of beers before dinner down their necks. What will come of it after all?
The later pointing out that the locals really mean it all often leads to wine being spat over dinner.....
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Wednesday 1st August 2012 17:34 GMT vgrig_us
I actually use hotmail more than any other email i have
Reason - it has a "fat" client. Hate webmails. Now - gmail does have IMAP, but by the time they came up with internalization, un-threaded folder view, etc. - i lost interest. Plus - they don't preserver plain text formatting well - Linux kernel developers won't accept patches from gmail accounts.
Also - hotmail still shows X-originating IP address header, gmail fakes it. So if someone in Nigeria claims to be from, say, Boston - i'll know right away in hotmail, but not gmail.
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Wednesday 1st August 2012 20:51 GMT Mike Flugennock
To drag things back on-topic...
Around 1993, when I got my first PPP Internet account and learned how to use Eudora and procmail, one of the first domains that went into my straight-into-the-shitcan list was hotmail.com. Never in the nearly twenty years I've had email did I see anything either delivered from hotmail -- or spoofed with hotmail.com as the "from" address -- that wasn't spam. In fact, in the mid '90s, throwing hotmail.com, along with yahoo.com and aol.com into my procmail "shitcan list" pretty much eliminated 90% of the spam aimed at my inbox.
So, I suppose I do have hotmail to thank for consolidating all that spam in one place so I could shitcan it all in one stroke.
I had a hotmail account very briefly about ten years ago -- actually logged into it only once or twice -- as a backup address for email while on the road and, as the article mentions, to provide a sacrificial email address for those obnoxious-assed Web sites which insist that I "register".
Of course, it seems that gmail.com has taken over that role recently; I had gmail.com in my SpamAssassin "shitcan without mercy" list for quite a while, until I was forced to open several gmail accounts to start a couple of blogs I run and my YouTube channel.
I also use them as my sacrificial email addresses to throw at aforementioned obnoxious-assed Web sites, and for order confirmations when I shop online, and as emergency backup addresses in case my own domains' email servers go down (rarely). I log onto them once or twice a week, maybe, to catch any stray email I may actually want to read, and to scrape out all the spam.
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Thursday 2nd August 2012 12:02 GMT Tom 13
Re: gmail gets just too much spam
Of all the accounts (and I've had quite a few) I've had, gmail gets the least spam, even in the spam box.
Signed up for a Live account (one of the many rebrands of Hotmail) when I was out of work and someone recommended I be on FB for job searching. Don't monitor it much anymore. When I did, all of the spam I got was my own fault (damn Monster).
The account where I see the most spam hitting the inbox instead of the designated spam folder is my Yahoo account. Which may explain some of their problems.
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