Comments welcome by email. I don't care if you disagree with me but name-calling and cussing are not acceptable. Comments that are just rude and not relevant will not be posted.
I had hopes that Upstairs Neighbor woud be gone the entire long weekend but no such luck. He got back this afternoon and right now I'm experiencing the "joy" of Austin Powers way too loud from above. Sigh... Even if I were watching the same channel I'd have been annoyed (like every Tuesday when we both watch 24) but since I chose to watch something new instead, it's especially irritating. Well, as long as it's turned down by 10... (Am I unreasonable in thinking that even if I can hear a neighbor's tv I shouldn't be able to tell what station he's watching?)
You're a kid who's gotta do what ya gotta do. You're Tommy!
§ - Car Safety Gear Can Pose Threat to Rescuers - "Today's cars are designed to save lives at the moment of impact. After that, all bets are off. . . . There are no guarantees to the EMT, the cop, the firefighters trying to do the rescue."
§ - For fontaholics, linguists, and Biblical scholars - Biblical Fonts
§ - Pantless Driver Charged Over Kiddie Porn - "A man caught driving naked from the waist down while watching kiddie porn on his laptop has become the first man in Toronto charged for allegedly stealing an Internet connection."
"Most spammers are used to hopping from one e-mail account to another. Still, one of the most effective ways to hit back at them is to complain to their Internet service providers. Since 1998, Haight, a software engineer based in Seattle, has operated Spamcop.net, a Web site devoted to streamlining the process of determining the origin of spam e-mails and reporting them to the relevant Internet service providers."
"The 419 scam has been so successful in the past 20 years that according to Reuters news agency it is a significant foreign exchange earner in Nigeria."
"The basic 419 fraud has existed in letter-writing form since the late 1980s. The Internet has vastly increased the reach of the fraudsters."
I know for sure it's been around a lot longer than that! I was getting basically the same letters back in the mid-60s during my junior high penpal stage, when my name was on dozens of "looking for penfriends" lists. The letters were typed on onion skin so that they could do more copies at once with carbon paper and spend less on postage with the lightweight paper. (Historical note: photocopies back then, if you had access to a copy machine at all, were gray and slimy and stunk—yes, literally smelly—so weren't actually used for anything "businesslike" yet. After all, the scammers couldn't pretend that I was the one trusted person they chose to write to if they used those glaringly obvious copies.)
Of course, even as a kid the carbon paper thing was obvious to me—who did they think they were fooling?! I also wondered why they were wasting their time sending these obviously bogus letters to kids—those penpal lists generally included ages so yes, the crooks knew what they were doing, though I guess maybe they figured all of us would go running to Mom and Dad asking for the money to do this thing and our folks would jump at the opportunity.
Maybe the letters only just started coming from Nigeria specifically in the 80s? I don't remember the details of the scam letters I got way back before then. Funny, with all the junk I've clung to over the years, those letters never struck me as anything that would become historical artifacts so they're long gone!
Another good overview of the spam problem. "Must safety-conscious IT departments force workers to give up the Internet, with its growing array of treasures? That's refusing to eat for fear of choking."
"The US authorities had the opportunity to make a real stand against spam, but through attempting to come to a compromise with the direct mail industry they have only managed to create an enormous fudge."
