[ih] spam...

[Mike Padlipsky]

At 04:40 PM 1/20/03, David P. Reed wrote:
>Some of us aren't Luddites who fear every innovation like the villagers in 
>Frankenstein.

resisting the temptation to observe that some of us don't find even 
second-order ad hominem arguments tasteful, i'll merely observe that the 
parallel between 'frankenstein' [presumably the book of that name, not the, 
er, innovator nor his, um, innovation] and html strikes me as being rather 
profound [perhaps, indeed, unintentionally so], if you think about a 
predeconstructionist reading of the book: both the markup language and the 
'monster' started out in a state of innocence, as it were, and were 
arguably rather appealing ... and both turned rather ugly [and perhaps, 
indeed, dangerous] after being misunderstood and abused by the mob.

couple that w/ the Law wh/ holds that 'optimality differs according to 
context' and it seems to me eminently arguable that irrespective of html's 
virtues in the abstract [and flaws in practice [*] ] nobody _needs_ to send 
html-bearing netmail [as we called it when we were inventing it] to the 
internet history list for purposes germane to the internet history list, so 
filtering out html-bearing netmail wld furnish a quick-and-dirty, but 
effective, means of frustrating at least some of the Bandwidth Bandits.

granted, there might be some practical reason i'm overlooking [**] for not 
applying the seemingly clever 'fix', but i strongly doubt any 
re-interpretation of the late mrs. shelley's literary milestone cld be 
convincing.


[*] a 'thread' on herb grosch's unfortunately foiled attempt to require 
that 'floor equals ceiling' on the 'features' repertoires of all 
government-acceptable cobol implementations when he was at nbs and its 
relevance to html might be edifying and amusing.  'what price "open"?' wld 
be a nice title.  i'm not going to start it, tho; i've already been tempted 
by [ih] stuff to spend more time keyboarding than i ought to lately.

[**] perhaps almost everybody else doesn't set 'his' mailer not to emit 
html as a matter of course, and courtesy, and perhaps most mailers stupidly 
stick the giveaway line in the headers even if no html was used in the 
making of the msg, so people wld have to go to some trouble to get past the 
filter for legitimate mail.  if so, most likely most people wldn't want to 
bother and the plan shldn't be put in place.  otherwise, tho, why not.


cheers, map

[whose shoulder problems caused him to break down some time ago and create
a 'signature' file to apologize for the lack of his formerly customary
e-volubility -- and who's been employing shiftless typing for a long time
now to spare his wristsnfingers, in case you didn't know ... and who's
further broken down and done http://www.lafn.org/~ba213/mapstuff.html ,
rather grudgingly]