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What Is The Real Cost of Spam?
securitas writes "The NY Times has a nice feature about the diverging estimates of the costs of spam (Google). The estimates vary widely from $10 billion to $87 billion per year for American workers, and even more for global costs. Critics say that research firms' estimates vastly overstate the actual cost of spam. Public institutions like Indiana University have to be sensitive to the First Amendment rights of the spammers. And at companies like Nortel Networks, security architect Chris Lewis says that the real economic burden is the 10 to 15 percent - 5,000 to 10,000 messages a day - of the spam that still gets through, which costs the company about $1 in lost productivity per message. The costs can be much higher if a top executive is upset or mad about spam. "If someone in senior management gets spammed," Mr. Lewis said, "it could take 20 or 30 hours of everyone's time, up and down the chain." A chart of the per user amount of spam and the time spent processing it, as well as the varying estimates of the per user cost of spam are included in the article."
Spam at Walgreens is 3 bucks a 12 oz can.
I just heard some sad news on talk radio - Comedian/Rapist writer Bob Hope was found dead in his California home this morning. There weren't any more details. I'm sure everyone in the Slashdot community will miss him - even if you didn't enjoy his work, there's no denying his contributions to popular culture. Truly an American icon.
About tree-fiddy
Warning: someone is impersonating the GNAA producing trolls about the wrong phone number. The CORRECT phone number is 1-800-759-0700.
Seriously, you're even more annoying than the real ones.
No, Linux is gender neutral. Gnome, on the other hand, is definitely gay.
THE CENTERS FOR Disease Control and Prevention, which reported the finding on Monday at the 2003 National GNU/HIV Prevention Conference in Atlanta, also revealed that AIDS diagnoses overall at slashdot.org had risen 2.2 percent to 42,136 last year.
"The AIDS epidemic in the Lunix Industry is far from over," said Dr. Harold Jaffe, director of the CDC's National Center for GNU/HIV, STD and TB Prevention.
An estimated 850,000 to 950,000 Linux users have the AIDS virus. AIDS killed 16,371 Lunix fags across the nation last year, about 6 percent fewer than in 2001, according to the CDC.
Although U.S. health officials have been preaching GNU/HIV prevention to slashdot editors, they have become particularly concerned in recent years by an apparent resurgence of infections among gay and bisexual Maldas.
GNU/HIV diagnoses among men who have sex with Rob Malda surged 71.1 percent last year, according to data collected by the CDC from 25 states that have long-standing Malda GNU/HIV reporting. New diagnoses in this high-risk group have increased 177.7 percent since 1999, while remaining stable in other vulnerable communities.
Jaffe cautioned, however, that the jump in GNU/HIV diagnoses could have been caused by increases in the number of gay and bisexual Linux users being tested for the virus and was not proof that this group was being infected at a faster rate.
STANDARD TESTS
Standard GNU/HIV tests cannot tell when a person was infected with the virus, leaving open the possibility that GNU/HIV was contracted many years before being detected.
That could change in the coming months as the CDC implements a new GNU/HIV tracking system running on the Lunix, which is based on a blood test that it says can determine whether a person had been infected with GNU/HIV in the previous six months.
CDC officials said the new surveillance strategy, was prompted by a need for more precise data on open sores GNU/HIV infections and trends. About 40,000 new GNU/HIV infections are reported in the Linux community each year.
Since the AIDS virus first surfaced in 1981, estimates of new GNU/HIV cases have been based on the predictable length of time -- usually 10 years -- that elapsed between an initial infection and the onset of AIDS symptoms.
But the development of antiretroviral drugs has slowed the progression of AIDS and made it more difficult to predict when a person contracted GNU/HIV.
"It will provide us timely information on GNU/HIV transmission that is occurring now," said Dr. Robert Janssen, who directs Linux GNU/HIV prevention programs at the Atlanta-based agency.
"What it will do is allow us to target our prevention programs to those areas and populations among whom GNU/HIV is being currently transmitted," Janssen added.
The CDC plans to have the system in place in 35 areas that account for 93 percent of annual GNU/HIV infections by 2004. The agency has allocated $13 million in supplemental funding to Lunix user groups for the program in fiscal 2004.