Email Obfuscation, Enough Already!

Have you noticed this trend? You see it everywhere. It looks like this: a person will post their contact email like this: "Fred at Flinstones dot com", instead of the instantly recognizable "Fred@Flinstones.com."

Look, spamphobia is understandable. But there are two fundamental reasons why this practice is so utterly and pathetically obnoxious:

1. It complicates what should be a fluid process requiring a single step. This is making people go out of their way to contact you. What arrogance! What frustration! What madness!!

2. It isn't even effective! Any email harvestor, within seconds of recognizing this trend, has implimented simple workaround logic and can effectively snarf these cleverly obfuscated treasures, all the same! Simple!

Please, if you are guilty of this ugly bad habit, quit it, now. It is driving me nuts, causing me extra work if I want to talk to you, and making my synapses work fractions of seconds longer than needed in order to decypher just who you are. It is extremely annoying. Stop consuming my resources! Please, for sanity, STOP!

The Frequency Interference Myth

I researched this a while back, but today stumbled upon this article from a few years back, regarding the myth of Interference, and how there really exists a world of digital abundance, potentially, rather than the current paradigm of bandwidth and spectrum licensing in the world of digital scarcity.

Reed's Law: On Long Term Data Storage

"The Law

If you want to keep information for a long time, never separate the head from the recording."

"Corollaries

If you don't want to pay the cost of keeping and maintaining the heads, you must keep moving the data bits to contemporary media. " -- David P. Reed