stackoverflow and c.l.py

[john]

On Sep 14, 4:58 pm, Steven D'Aprano <steve
+comp.lang.pyt... at pearwood.info> wrote:
> memilanuk wrote:
> > On 09/14/2011 05:47 AM, Chris Angelico wrote:
> >> The SNR here isn't bad either. Most of the spam gets filtered out, and
> >> even stuff like Ranting Rick posts can be of some amusement when it's
> >> a slow day...
>
> > I subscribe to the list via Gmane, and if 'most of the spam' gets
> > filtered out, I'd hate to see how much gets submitted as I still see 2-5
> > minimum blatant spam per day on here.
>
> 2-5 spam posts is nothing. (Well, I know any spam is too much spam, but
> still.) Since nearly all of it is obvious, it's easy to filter out of your
> mail client, news client, or if all else fails, your attention. The hard
> ones to ignore are the ones that look like they might be legitimate, but
> fortunately most spammers are too lazy or stupid to bother with even the
> most feeble disguise.
>
> Either way, I don't consider half a dozen spam posts a day to be anything
> more than a minor distraction.
>
> Commercial spam is annoying, but otherwise harmless because it is so easy to
> filter. What's really the problem is crackpots, trollers and griefers,
> because there is a terrible temptation to engage them in debate: "someone
> is wrong on the Internet!". If you want to see a news group gone bad, go to
> something like sci.math. You can't move for the cranks "disproving"
> Cantor's Diagonal Theorem and Special Relativity and proving that 10**603
> is the One True Actual Infinity (I'm not making that last one up!).
>
> --
> Steven

And, all this time, I'd thought it was ((10**603) - 1) that was the
highest.  Oh, well.