Sure it's legal. Just read about it in the newspaper. You still subscribe to a newspaper, right?

No dead tree? Okay, so look it up on your smartphone. Oh wait. You don't have the right smartphone. Yet.

I would like to see some historical research correlating mentions of national leaders with various job-related metrics and divided up by geography.

Easy example: Little Kim gets LOTS of extremely favorable public mentions in North Korea. From near zero to HUGE in a few days (when he became established as the successor)--and at some point his mentions will approach zero again. But outside of North Korea? Not so many and not so favorable. Ever.

The YOB case is (relatively) interesting because he had quite a lot of name recognition even before 2015. Media and even book references that still surprise me. Like ghosts from the past? (To be compared with books written before and after perpetual September? Circa 1995?)

My reaction to the story was "Tell us something we didn't know." News is supposed to have some element of novelty in it. You know, novelty as in new.

However, I think the phishing scams disguised as fake upgrades are more annoying, and probably more dangerous, since the sucker is primed to expect something to get installed. As regards this story I thought there might be an element of novelty in it. Perhaps a new scammer's pitch to enter your credit card number to validate the unsubscribe request? Something along those lines.

Solutions time? Why do I persist in hoping the direction of criminal change in the Web can be shifted?

I keep imagining a website that helps potential suckers aggregate the targeting data so the scammers can be found and stopped more quickly. Hopefully definitively, too, as in throw them into that lovely prison in El Salvador. Get some good out of it?

So now to flog that dead horse!

The basic idea would be an iterative website where you would paste the scam and then help parse the meaning to guide the response. Of course these days it would be enhanced with AI, but the key idea is that each iteration would clarify what is going on and what should be done about it. Per this specific story, that so-called unsubscribe link would be studied to see how malicious it is and the human being in the loop would confirm the threat or provide feedback about what the website got wrong. And of course the website would be amalgamating the results to provide stats that guide the prioritization of the responses. A dangerous new threat that is producing lots of reports needs to be dealt with ASAP, though I doubt the "new threat" of this story would merit much priority.

More details available if someone is interested. NOT a new idea. Or let's hear your better solution approach. I'm sure you have a big wad of better ideas stuffed in a pocket somewhere.

(But actually my primary focus right now was provoked by that awful book Science Fictions by Stuart Ritchie... Linkage is complicated, but now I want to see some exploratory research on how much and in what ways each nation's top leader is mentioned in the media over time. Easy example: Little Kim of North Korea. LOTS of favorable coverage inside and not much mention outside, with what there is being not so favorable. Any leads?)

Kind of a new Slashdot effect? I think I'm actually seeing some evidence of higher than usual mortality among old websites and I've been wondering if the cause might be AI spiders seeking more training data. Latest victim might be Tripod? But that one was already a ghost zombie website...

Again with the missed opportunities for humor, but too late to even contribute to the discussion... My time is too slow for Slashdot time?

There was so much potential in the idea of the Navy invading the contractor to get the ovens fixed.

Not getting why this was modded funny rather than sad?

Mostly the ACK, but thanks for the food for thought. But I keep thinking they should get a better financial model that could support some actual improvements...

Thanks for clarifying. His description did not ring that bell--but I rarely see it. Perhaps my timezone is out of sync?

Well played sir. Could only be funnier if it were signed by an AI.

Is that a joke based on reading the article? You should know that never happens around here... Or maybe not, looking at the UID.

However the story has big potential for funny, so I'll check for details at 11.

Anecdotal evidence: In my dotage I often take a morning nap and it doesn't seem to affect me whether or not I drink coffee with breakfast. But I may have some kind of REM sleep disorder...

Basically the ACK with at least some concurrence, but I wonder (again) how long this discussion might have gone on if Slashdot allowed for persistent topics. Some topics are fundamentally too deep to discuss meaningfully in a the standard time unit of Slashdot. (Basically one day until it falls off the front page.)

Well I definitely disagree with the part about touch typing coming on its own. It's not a natural skill in any way that I can see. Then it gets into the strangeness about which keyboard I'm using in relation to the language settings (since I use two). My fingers "know" to switch layouts as soon as a special character comes up wrong?

However the bigger questions involve typing versus alternatives. For one of my languages I actually do most of my input via voice, which then has to be corrected. However I'm doing that deliberately to improve my pronunciation, so it certainly isn't part of the design plan. For correction there is an option to use a QWERTY keyboard, but I normally don't...

Yet within an IDE a lot of stuff is "typed" for you, and even formatted, so rapid selection from options becomes more important than touch typing? The AskSlashdot topic is "How important...?" and I still can't decide about the future. I think it used to be very important, but with AI support improving, maybe not so much next year?

I wish it was easier to see the chronology of comments on Slashdot... But right now this one appears at the end of a discussion that touched a lot of interesting points. I wasn't really going for that, but perhaps it was because I should have used "bizarro" in the Subject rather than "reverso"?

Really hard to summarize my position, but... If we insist that human beings have special value and deserve some form of special dignity, then we reach conclusions like preventing children from starving to death. Most folks would agree with that, but there's a slippery slope up to things like "heath care as a human right" or UBI where there is lots of disagreement. Or even minimum wage laws. Not sure how sliding up works, but...

The natural solution is different. In natural systems surplus produces growth until there is no surplus. All the animals are supposed to be on the edge of starvation all of the time. Okay, that is an exaggeration, but mostly because of the seasons. Usually it works our that breeding takes place during the season of surplus and most of the dying takes place during the off seasons.

When you do the numbers things get strange, leading me to strange conclusions. For example, the random shuffle of genes means that half the shuffles are worse than average and Ma Nature wants to square that circle with more than four kids but only two survivors (on average) for the next generation--and yet I haven't met any people who like the idea of seeing most of their children die before reproducing. Less of a problem if Ma Nature kills most of the parents before the question of which two survive is answered? But my strange conclusion for economics is that UBI is likely but I'd rather focus on limiting economic competition in ways that reduces the need for minimum wage laws...

Mod parent funny?

However i think the biggest joke may be that the sharks might be going after each other. Not the only reason, but one of the requirements for becoming so stinking rich is that they ALWAYS want MORE money, even though they already have more money than makes any human sense. Up to now, they have mostly been content to squeeze blood out of the impoverished cabbages like you and me, but if they are sincerely attacking each other, then maybe they've realized there isn't any more cash = blood available down here, so now they just have to attack each other for MORE. (And of course I'm also thinking of a couple of other blood feuds in the news...)

But I get to include the ancient joke as obligatory:

Question: Why won't sharks attack lawyers?

Answer: Professional courtesy.

Now if I was an actual comedian I would either update the joke in some relevant way or combine it with the thing about "No honor among thieves".

And a relevant citation? How about Science Fictions by Stuart Ritchie? Mostly relevant because I'm sure someone paid him for the hit job on science. I can't figure out how to pan the book hard enough... Perhaps "A lot of good mixed with a tiny bit of not so good is the enemy of the perfect" or something about projection from his own field of psychology. Or the hype? One example is his hyping of the list of bad-science authors when I think he should have included a list of bad-science fields...