SPAM is the ultimate form of shotgun marketing.  Most SPAM marketers expect fewer than 1 in 5000 e-mail recipients to ever follow one of their links (and less still to actually buy the product advertised on the other side).  In order to support such an inaccurate form of marketing, spammers need to build up huge pools of e-mail addresses at very little cost.

That’s where e-mail spam-bots come in.  According to Wikipedia:
E-mail spambots harvest e-mail addresses from the Internet in order to build mailing lists for sending unsolicited e-mail, also known as spam. Such spambots are web crawlers that can gather …

Barely a month into the New Year and I’m sticking with my resolutions: I just read Patricia O’Connor’s Woe is I: The Grammarphobe’s Guide to Better English in Plain English.

I recommend it to you, be you grammarphobe or grammarphile.

Ms O’Connor, as a former editor of The New York Times Book Review, has probably seen some truly wretched writing over the years. With Woe is I she firmly, kindly and wittily sets us straight.

Woe is I is easy to read. I know that it’s the grammarphiles among us who actually read, page by page, books …

Apple is playing a dangerous game with its new iPad release.

Like the iPhone before it, the iPad seems positioned to sell itself as a digital multi-tool: all the apps of an iPhone, same G3 wireless connectivity, additional functionality as an e-reader, multi-touch recognition (allowing true on screen keyboards) and the size and processing speed of a laptop.

However the iPad also has one of the same shortcomings of the iPhone, no Flash.

In a handheld device where all internet access is still something of a novelty visitors who can’t load a page will simply (and correctly) assume that it does not have …