My Experience with Telemarketers

This week a "Do Not Call" list was created listing the names of people who prefer not to be called by telemarketers. These people are to the telephone what spam is to email. There are five ways of communicating, and there is or was junk in all five. The five ways are telephone, with crank calls and telemarketers; US postal service, with junk mail; fax, with junk fax, which was declared illegal a number of years ago; email with spam, and face-to-face. Yes, I have had junk people come to the door selling a variety of products. How do you get rid of them?

Anyway, the Do Not Call list was set up, and the response was tremendous. The site www.donotcall.gov received 1,000 calls a second. At that rate, every household and adult in the United States will be on the list in about two and a half days. The site was made slow by the huge traffic that arrived at it. So what was my experience with telemarketers? About a year ago they got more and more frequent, with frequent hangup calls from "out of area" or from "unavailable". I therefore obtained Call Intercept from Verizon, which intercepts out of area and unavailable calls and makes the caller identify himself before he or she gets answered. That turns off most telemarketers. That is indeed how it worked. The number of telemarketers calling me dropped off to near zero. The only ones I got were those who attempted to get through Call Intercept (there were only one or two), or those who had valid numbers on my caller ID. I found the service too expensive, however, so I dropped it. After that I have still not received many telemarketing calls. About half of them had a valid telephone number on my caller ID. So I will keep Call Intercept off and wait to see if I get more telemarketers. If I do, then I will sign up for the registry.

Library internet filters won't work

Today the Supreme Court said that libraries can be required by law to put Internet filters on their computers to block patrons from viewing "adult" material. I don't think this will work. There appears to be no way a program can distinguish "adult" from non-"adult". Words won't work. Words such as suck, screw, ass, and ball have, in addition to their filterable meanings, other meanings that have absolutely nothing to do with sexual activity, for example. Not even breast or naked will work because these words have non-sexual meanings, for example, the chicken breast. It will instead block access to non-"adult" sites, for example sites on naked-eye astronomy, meaning astronomy without a telescope. These filters want you to have your clothes on, but your telescope has to be on too? Further, knowing these filters are in existence, both legitimate web site owners and porno site owners will change their words to avoid the filters; for example, fcuk, baull and so forth. Our language will be debased and distorted as we will not be able to say screw as in a light bulb any more but will have to say something like smew. Furthermore, filter makers will reconstruct these sites to block these words, and then porno site owners will avoid these blocked words, and so forth. It is just like with spam. Eventually, pornographic web sites will be harmless because they will be 100% gibberish and the pictures will be featureless blurs. And maybe so will all other sites. I agree with people who say that people will not access "adult" sites in a public place, where the neighbor down the street could be watching. Maybe we need to protect children from sexually explicit sites. But we also need to ensure that our language stays clear with words chosen to express a thought of the expresser rather than to avoid a filter. I urge municipalities, state governments, and Congress not to pass laws that would require libraries to install filters.

Yet another dead-for-a-ducat strike

Over the weekend the US again tried to take out the deposed Iraqi leadership, including perhaps Saddam himself, with a strike near the Syrian border. That makes three dead-for-a-ducat strikes that the US has made on Iraqi leadership. I get the name for this type of action from Shakespeare's Hamlet, in the scene where Hamlet is griping to the Queen and others about conditions in Denmark and then he hears a scream behind a curtain. Thinking it is the King who killed his father, the rightful King, he takes a swing with his dagger at the curtain and kills not the King, but Polonius, while saying "How now a rat? Dead for a ducat, dead!" Hamlet's strike did not turn out well. He did not take out the King, and he killed innocent people in the process.

Is that what's happened to the three dead-for-a-ducat strikes in Persian Gulf War II? One thing's for sure. At least two of these strikes were failures (with respect to an individual, say Saddam). This is because you can kill a person only once. If the first dead-for-a-ducat strike succeeded, then the second two were certain failures. Of course, each of these strikes could have taken one element out from the set {Saddam, Qusai, Udai}. But it isn't likely.

The thing that's for sure now is that the US campaign in Iraq is not going well. The oil has yet to flow and the drilling equipment is in bad shape, American soldiers are being killed almost every day, no weapons of mass destruction have been found, and the new prosperous democratic Iraq is taking shape very slowly.

Coja el alcohol!

The translator in Google seems tremendous. You put a web page or a text into a blank, select the type of translation, hit a button, and here! (or voilá!) the page or text in the other language. Babelfish has constructed this translator, which is also used on Alta Vista. But how good is it? It translates most everything OK but it still is a long way from producing fluent prose, and it may never get there. There are some egregious examples using it. For example, try "Catch the spirit!", which was a slogan of a Toastmaster district a few years ago. You get "Coja el alcohol!" and your thought is "Hey! Wrong kind of spirit(s)!" This was noticed by Leon Bloy of Argentina in his blog of last year, when he noticed that religious statements had hilarious or even sacrilegious translations into Spanish. For example, "holy spirit" translates into "alcohol santo". The holy liquor, I suppose. What's more, Sr. Bloy points out that Babelfish doesn't even know the Spanish word "santo". If you put that into Babelfish, from Spanish to English, you get "santo" and a comment that it can't be translated. And you get sentences like "Esta página está para el alcohol santo"; that is, "This page is for the holy alcohol." Sr. Bloy has many other egregious examples, and I refer you to his entertaining blog, which is written in Spanish. Babelfish has trouble with other languages as well. For example, I typed in once "planes or something" in an attempt to describe something in the sky. In Spanish I got "planos o algo", and in German I got "Flachen odor etwas." Apparently Babelfish thinks that planes in English are geometrical planes or two-dimensional manifolds, instead of airplanes. To get the latter, you have to say "airplane" and then Babelfish will give you "Flugzeuge".

No, Babelfish is helpful but don't try to converse with someone using it unless you edit it first. It's much worse than a spelling checker.

Spam Gibberish

It is now my opinion that eventually spam will become gibberish. It will mean absolutely nothing. The reason is this. When spam originated, its intent was to have the recipient buy something or do something (like pass a chain letter or a diatribe) for the sender. It was like mass marketing. Therefore, words like free, credit, mortgage and so forth appeared in the body and subject of spam. This made a good way of detecting spam: if it had free in the subject, then it was spam. Of course then we have to spell free as frie or something like that in the subject of emails to prevent spamkillers from classifying them as spam and deleting them.

Well guess what? The spammers have figured this out too. Now they send gibberish strings like lnwfdlnvple in their subjects, have email addresses that start with numbers such as 18339829, and misspell viagra as v_iagra. This means they are delivering less fruitful content and more nonsense. We defend ourselves against the fruitful content that they do have by using these as keywords. They respond by messing up these words or replacing them with gibberish. This will keep up over and over again in a cycle until the spammers send a completely random string of symbols in both the subject and the body. So spam emails will be 100% gibberish.

If this is a majority of the email traffic in the world, this email traffic will become the greatest emitter of white noise ever devised.