Charles on… anything that comes along

Over at TechDigest, there’s an apparently wrong claim that the Bluewater shopping centre off the M25 is a noxious source of spam - that if you walk around with Bluetooth on your mobile phone active, you’ll receive Bluespam (go on, let’s coin the phrase).

Except that it seems it ain’t so, according to the person who was there: I’d be interested to hear what [Tech Digest] have heard about Bluewater. Is there something new in the way of BlueSpam or even good old-fashioned SMS spam?

Or could they be referring to the ZagMe service, which I was involved in running there a few years back, I wonder?

And has anyone yet received Bluespam? (As in Bluetooth spam, not the rude sort..)

These posts might be related (the database thinks..):
• ISP Prime and Phantographics - fraudsters or just incompetent? (21 May 2005; score: 41.37%)
• Spam catcher updated, which I hope will solve problems with nice people being unable to pass comment (26 September 2005; score: 38.37%)
• Spam attack? Tell Google, and wipe out online herpes (14 July 2005; score: 36.41%)

Besides confessing to his mistakes in predicting the US election result, Bob Cringley also writes of his experiences in Iran during the Iran-Iraq war, spectating at the front line:

There were several thousand kids and their job was to rise out of the trench, praising Allah, run across No Man’s Land, be killed by the Iraqi machine gunners, then go directly to Paradise, do not pass GO, do not collect 200 dinars. And that’s exactly what happened in a battle lasting less than 10 minutes. None of the kids fired a shot or made it all the way to the other side. And when I asked the purpose of this exercise, I was told it was to demoralize the cowardly Iraqi soldiers.

It was the most horrific event I have ever seen, and I once covered a cholera epidemic in Bangladesh that killed 40,000 people.

As he rightly points out, US voters who pushed for Bush said it was about “morality”. Same is true for Iran. What effective limit is there to the number of Islamic kids willing to blow themselves to bits? There is no limit, which means that a Bush Doctrine can’t really stand in that part of the world.

What I find alternatively funny and depressing is how people like Melanie Philips fulminate about religious extremism and fundamentalism - as practised by Islamic groups. Yes, extremism is wrong. But the seed of so much of the conflict is religion. Sure, there are extremists in all fields - animal rights, environmentalism - but it’s surprisingly hard to recruit them to be suicide bombers. But sprinkle in some of that ol’ God stuff..

These posts might be related (the database thinks..):
• IBM will crush competition in servers, says Cringley - and Sun's in trouble (13 December 2004; score: 74.44%)
• iPod analysis: are the music wars already over? And will the Mac mini restart the PC wars? (13 January 2005; score: 55.23%)
• Want some trouble? Do a religious ad in the style of the "I'm a Mac" ad (8 December 2006; score: 38.38%)