On Tue, 27 May 2003, Vernon Schryver wrote: > > From: Dean Anderson <dean@av8.com> > > > ... > > No one has demonstrated any cost to spam, other than annoyance and > > infrastructure costs which are passed on to users[1], and it seems there > > is very little to add. > > That's a ridiculous overstatement. Spam may be too cheap to meter > for an individual user, but if you have 30,000,000 users or only > 30,000, you'll find that the total costs are substantial, particularly > when you need to double the size of your systems to deal with a doubling > of spam. Whether you have 30 million or 30 thousand, the costs are passed on to the user. At 30 million, economies of scale make the cost of spam (to the ISP) even less. It doesn't usually change the price to the user, so big ISPs tend to make more money at the same price level. Enterprises have revenue, too. And cost structures that are substantially different (with respect to email) from similarly sized ISPs. > > Vixie and other radicals also continues to ignore Shannon's theorems. ... > > While it's true that proving the non-existence of covert channels > is hard, you've not related that theorem to anything related to spam. > Even if covert channels or the relation among power, noise, bandwidth, > and information have something to do with spam, you've not shown > any connection to dealing with the spam problem. Its not hard, its impossible. I've pointed out the spam is a covert channel, with regard to Shannons theorem. > A good rule of thumb is that only people who don't know much about > major theorems like Shannon's and Godel's quote them as proofs in > discussions like this. I think you should have chosen some other > beautiful bit of archana such one of the fixed point theorems or > Fred J. Cohen's Forcing and Generic instead of something that more > than a few people around here know about such as covert channels. This is a fine exposition, about what I'm not sure.. It does not seem to demonstrate that I am wrong, or that spam isn't a covert channel, or that Shannon's theorem (somehow) doesn't apply. Apparently, you don't understand anything about covert channels, so perhaps you should let the ones who do try to dispute my assertions. --Dean