Re: Explaining spam to policians (was: test message)

[Piet Beertema <]

>   One day, a staff member was unable to find a scooter because it
>    had appearantly been misplaced by somebody else.  Since this
>    caused him an unplanned delay in his work, he wrote a complaint
>    letter about it, and since he didn't know who was responsible for
>    misplacing the scooter, he sent the letter to the internal staff
>    mailing list, which at Karolinska comprises around 3,000 people.
>   Assuming that each recipient spent on average 30 seconds reading
>    and otherwise dealing with the letter (some probably spent less,
>    others more, depending on their interest in the matter), it was
>    estimated that the total loss in productivity was roughly equal
>    to the cost of purchasing two new scooters.
The big difference with spam is that, once you're a bit versed
in dealing with it, it takes about half a second to qualify a
message as spam or not.

> The Karolinska Institute can be found at <URL:http://www.ki.se/>,
And the scooters? :-)

> Steve Jobs is told to have used similar reasoning in order to
> convince the MacOS developers to optimize system software for
> speed, i.e. multiplying any delay with the anticipated number of
> Macintoshes to be sold and translating it to the number of human
> lives either wasted or saved!
Never heard of these consequences of buying a Mac before. :-)


        Piet