Confessions of a Rocket Scientist
Wednesday, August 17, 2005
  Spamming My Blog: Is Nothing Sacred?

I found a comment for my earlier post about my X-Ray clone. It was an
ad for some health care stock scheme.
Yep, it was spam.
Have these people no sense of decency?
But if you think about it, this is the way that things have been going
for a long time. Advertising cretins really believe that they can
invade our privacy at any time of their choosing, by any means they
might access, and get righteously indignant if we criticise them for
it.
Think about the ways that advertising is seeking to invade every
aspect of your life.
I'm old enough to remember when FM radio did not have any commercials.
Hard to believe, isn't it? The broadcast stations made money by
selling access to the subcarrier frequency on their main signal. This
is a second signal that piggy-backs on the primary signal.
You need a special device called a discriminator to listen to it.
This is how Muzak and other subscription-type services are
distributed.
Well subcarrier signals are still being sold, but FM stations do
indeed play ads on their main carrier. The promise of commercial-free
radio was a hollow one. It makes me wonder just how long this new
commercial-free satellite radio is going to last.
But this only illustrates the mindset of the advertising industry.
They will invade our privacy in any way they can find. Junk mail is
one example. I get a lot more ads in the mail than I get actual
communication, and most of it is unsolicited. I have to go through
the stuff and throw it out. Marketers are taking advantage of postal
regulations that were originally designed to encourage distribution of
newspapers and magazines. It's paid for by our taxes.
Just the other day I was driving and my cell phone rang. Being a
conscientious driver I immediately pulled over to take the call. You
guessed it, it was a telemarketer. He didn't care that he was using
up the airtime I had paid for and had interrupted my drive. All he
cared about was trying to sell me something I did not want.
And we all get spam in our e-mail. The spam spinners keep getting
clever about circumventing spam filters. It clogs our inboxes and
wastes our bandwidth.
And now they have the gall to spam my blog!
It is my fervent wish that, wherever these unscrupulous, ill-mannered
blackguards may exist, in every endeavor they might undertake, that
they themselves are treated with the same disdain and lack of common
courtesy as they exhibit.

 
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Location: Quakertown, Pennsylvania, United States

Two time cancer survivor, happily married, LaSalle Alumnus

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