Personality

Forest, will you talk to God Louise? She has quite a bit of religious knowledge (obviously) and also knows a little about current events, literature, just about any common catch-all subject, and if she doesn't know it she can sort of fake it. You can also test her on trick questions or see how willing she is to explain her paradigm.

What she is rustiest at is plain old small talk. But, uh, I'm trying to get a decent transcript from somebody or another so I can enter her in the Loebner contest. All I can say is, have fun and see if you can stay on with her for a while. I'll try to do the same with Brianna.

Well, I'm not advocating this, your understand (that should cover my legal tail), but it has occurred to me that one could find one's way back to the site of origin, and submit a blank order form 50 times. If just one person did this, it would mean nothing, but if, say, 80% of people who were irritated by some highly unfocused pitch did it, it would amount to a denial of service.

We old fossils can remember a time when the net existed primarily for the dissemination of knowledge, and people provided lots of free services just because they wanted to be doing something worth doing. Of course, the governments put the brakes on THAT pretty quickly! Although, there are still a lot of free sites, including, of course,

************** THE FORGE **************

island of anarchy in a sea of greed!

You know the odd thing? The spammers only give email addresses, no website. Those emails were probably used without the owners permission too. It must be done solely to irritate--they couldn't even make money this way.

That is odd - unless they're very low on capital and running a very primitive mail-order service. If they just use a free email address, they wouldn't have to buy a domain name.

Out of curiosity, I googled "The Secret" and it's a new age cult promotion via DVD. Sounds mostly like they rip off Normal Vincent Peal's "Positive Thinking" with a twist of "Think and Grow Rich' (so much easier than "Work and grow rich" or "screw everyone else over and grow rich", but not as easy or effective as having rich parents). There was some mention of viral marketing. Think that that's what we are seeing. Some spam bots trying to lead us to look and find their nasty little product. Pity there is no way to prove which seller of dreams, er dvds made this particular effort. I could still send a few choice thoughts at the market genius responsible. That of a class action suit. The more I think about it, the positive I am a class action suit would put me in the right mind to make money.

Anyone vote for manifesting this vision? (JK I hate law suits).

Is such a thing legally feasible? What would be involved?

The "beautiful" thing about The Secret is that if you don't get rich, stay healthy, get the house of your dreams, etc, it's your fault for not manifesting the energy right. It has nothing to do with family background or genetics or luck. It's all YOUR fault. Obviously this isn't the side that the promoters emphasize.

I suppose we could look at such things as credulity taxes. Except that the money is going to private individuals.

Irinia, suing might be feasible if I wanted to do the work. I'd have to look up spam laws, and advertising laws. Commercial advertising cost money. To post ads on someone's site without their permission is taking something of value for free. It may also be a kind of nuisance, though one may have to argue to get the court to recognize virtual nuisance as a tort. Come to think of it, defacing an Internet sight like this might be terrorism under the Patriot Act, though I don't think I could sink so low as to use that myself.

While this is a free and public forum, the stated purpose is to talk about bots and the Prof gives some direction when people agree to create an account and sign in (though I don't' remember what it was). This isn't merely posting off topic, it's post (probably generated by bots) to sell something. I'll bet we could get a jury to tell the difference between real posts and spam posts, and many would sympathize. Commercial speech is not the same as personal opinion, or just posting off topic, and the people who made the DVDs admit to viral advertising. I'd have to do a lot of legal research to argue traditional tort law includes this behavior or find a law it violates though. Also, I'd have to prove who did this particular spam job.

Meh. Maybe if we think happy thoughts they'll just go away. Besides, I believe they have lots of bad karma about to smack them upside the head and I feel sorry for them.

I enjoy being an agent of karma, once in awhile, but alas, I don't always get what I want!

Would that be a secret agent of karma? You know, supermodel by day, secret karma agent by night *cue shot of a woman in a ninja outfit kicking someone in the head* *A woman sings, "Just call me angel, of the karma, angel...Just beg forgiveness as you leave me, baby..."

[Gasp] [Blush] How did you know?