Eats, shoots and spam's
Dec. 29th, 2006 02:04 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
Ain't grammar wonderful? You can use it to detect bogosity. What kind of person thinks that this is a convincing PayPal alert:

When you can make a healthy living from one in a million respondents, does it matter how lame your message is? If you're dealing with the bottom millionth of the bell curve, I doubt that a misplaced apostrophe will make a jot of difference. Those users, the same people who have trouble working out 20% off sale prices, are saying, "Urgh, it sez paypal so it wuz from paypal, innit," but, arguably (social Darwinism notwithstanding) they're the very users who need protection the most.
What I need is a spam filter that parses grammar and decides that things like this are rubbish. "Paypal don't send stuff with exclamations in and misplaced apostrophes" - a perfectly simple rule for humans, but a toughie for our whirring and bleeping slaves.

When you can make a healthy living from one in a million respondents, does it matter how lame your message is? If you're dealing with the bottom millionth of the bell curve, I doubt that a misplaced apostrophe will make a jot of difference. Those users, the same people who have trouble working out 20% off sale prices, are saying, "Urgh, it sez paypal so it wuz from paypal, innit," but, arguably (social Darwinism notwithstanding) they're the very users who need protection the most.
What I need is a spam filter that parses grammar and decides that things like this are rubbish. "Paypal don't send stuff with exclamations in and misplaced apostrophes" - a perfectly simple rule for humans, but a toughie for our whirring and bleeping slaves.