Wednesday 28 January, 2004 at 11:47PM (Nereus)  ::  permalink  ::  comments (3)  ::  trackbacks (1)

Ok a couple of things to rant about. A while ago I posted here and here about the ticketing spree the NYPD had been on to [presumably] try to generate more cashflow... well it's been on Fox5 News again tonight.

In one case a lady on the subway placed her handbag on the seat next to her rather than on her lap or on the floor - instant ticket. The reason? I wouldn't have a clue.

Another case involved a little kid about 3 years old who was playing with a balloon. The balloon popped. Guess what? Instant ticket for disturbing the peace or something ridiculous like that. Can you believe that? And yet it's quite ok for a police vehicle to blast their siren at 3 in the morning when they're driving down a completely empty street.

Now I realize that the police involved are being forced into this by their superiors because apparently they have ticketing quotas they have to meet, but hell, that's just getting ridiculous. Perhaps the police involved in these cases were just trying to prove a point that you shouldn't have to give tickets out just because you have a quota to meet, and ticketing extreme cases like these would give the message to their superiors that these ticket quotas are ridiculous. That I could relate to.

Think about it. You're a cop and you've been doing your thing all day and not a single person has done anything wrong. Good, right? Nope, that's bad, because you have to give out tickets to meet your quota or [presumably] your job is at risk. What do you do? Well, these cases are the answer to that question. To whoever is responsible for forcing the street cops to resort to these measures, pull yer head in and get a reality check. If cops aren't having to give out many tickets, that is a good thing, it basically means society is law-abiding. This extreme ticketing just causes resentment, and that in turn just makes the job harder for the cops in the long run when they need help from the public.

Ok next rant. Spammers. Yup one of my favourite topics. Spammers have a lot to answer for. I wrote a little while back about spammers and how one guy was recently arrested and jailed/heavily fined for sending many thousands of spam emails. On that post somebody commented that the authorities should spend more time busting 'real' criminals like robbers and drug dealers and stop wasting time busting someone for just sending email. I have to disagree in some ways, and I'll tell you why.

Because of spam, millions of dollars have been spent developing anti-spam software, and many millions more has been spent by companies and individuals paying to enlist the use of these anti-spam utilities. Thousands of hours of work time is wasted every day by employees having to sort through the spam in their business email boxes. Communications sent are not always received due to spam filters inadvertently shooting legitimate email into junk mail folders (I personally have missed jobs because of this). Spammers are jeopardizing what is probably the most significant communication tool in history, and they deserve to be dealt with harshly.

I can no longer rely on email getting to the person I send it to. During Christmas I sent a mass email message to about 30 people. As it turns out, nobody I've spoken to since then received it, presumably because their email filters saw it was a mass email and immediately sent it to the junk email box. Your writing style can also cause an email to be sent to a junk box. Ever wonder why some of these spam emails appear to have really bad english or a paragraph of seemingly random words? It's an attempt to get past spam filters that target certain phrases.

Not content with just sending email, spammers have moved on to targeting websites, particularly weblogs like this where they can leave comments. The intention is to leave a comment with a link to their site selling whatever their product is. The more links they can get, the higher they will place on search engine listings. I have had to employ a number of protection methods on this site as a result to try and combat this spam, and even so I had some loser post 127 comments on here yesterday that didn't even have any links on it, they just posted a few lines of random text characters each time, I guess out of frustration that I had protection in the first place so they couldn't spam their website links. What is amusing is that it took them nearly an hour to post 127 messages, and it took me about 15 seconds to delete them all.

Ok I had more to write about the effects spam has had on email but I think this post is long enough already and it's really all been said before anyway. I've got it out of my system for now anyway. We had over 8 inches of snow last night. Groovy. *waves*

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weblog : Urban Scrawl
entry title : no no kids zone (link)
exerpt : The NYPD have been at it again. On a similar vein to these previous entries, the latest effort from a couple of New York's Finest involved ticketing a woman for sitting on a park bench because she doesn't have... (read more)
tracked : September 29, 2005 4:40 PM (link)