andygates: (Default)
andygates ([personal profile] andygates) wrote2006-12-29 02:04 pm
Entry tags:

Eats, shoots and spam's

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.

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