Special Interest Group on CRAP

Just think if the Internet had been designed by the telephone companies:

We would have four different internets, with gateways that restricted what could flow through them.
You would have to buy your computer from your ISP, and you couldn’t switch ISPs and keep the same computer unless the remainder when you divided the MAC address by [...]

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A few years ago, my daughter became suddenly ill with abdominal pain and I had to take her to a doctor. I have relatively good health insurance through my employer (since I’m American that is my only viable option). The rules of the plan were:

Go to primary care physician
If primary care physician refers [...]

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Today I got another spam from ACM, plus a spam from “World Scientific Publishing” that tries to look like they are acting on behalf of Purdue University. I have appended the one from World Scientific Publishers in the hopes that it will shame them into avoiding spam in the future. Why would Purdue [...]

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Has anyone else noticed how the airlines have steadily devalued frequent flyer miles over the years? I just cashed in some miles to fly to Boston on United, and after much hassle with an arcane web site, managed to secure some economy seats. United has something called “Economy Plus”, but in reality, they [...]

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I got another spam from Cambridge University Press today. Apparently this is their new strategy for success as a tree-murdering paper publisher.
They provide an opt-out link at the bottom: http://listserv.cup.org/t/49324/239073/2681/0/ which obviously contains campaign information in it, but apparently they were too incompetent to encode my email address in there because the form asks [...]

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Today I received spam from Cambridge University Press, using an email address that I used to register for the ACM Electronic Commerce Conference in 2006. It appears that even supposedly reputable organizations cannot resist the temptation to send spam.

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Everyone probably gets these emails telling you that you have a long lost uncle who was an official in Africa who left you $21 million, and if you’d just send $1,000 to them then they will wire you the money. They are called 419 scams. About once a year I also get an [...]

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Part of the recent discussion about the demise of Chrysler and GM has centered on their dealer network. One report stated that Chrysler has more than 3100 dealers, whereas Toyota has only 1200 dealers. Since Toyota sells far more cars, you’d think that Chrysler needs to cut their dealer network.
But that kind of [...]

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Now that the federal government set the precedent of giving out money to companies that made bad decisions in their business processes, it seems that the lineup for handouts is getting quite lengthy. The latest companies to come through rattling a tin cup are GM, Ford, and Chrysler. While I am very concerned [...]

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