Is There Any Way to Really Fight Spam?

Hold a Sit-In!

Spam wastes an incredible amount of resources, and nobody likes it, except the spammers themselves. After all, they're making money. The endless cycle of putting up filters and such is the wrong approach; they just keep finding ways of getting past them. After all, you want to get your email, right?

What we need to do is attack the demand for spam. We can hold a "sit-in" at the sponsors' web sites! Just as with a traditional sit-in, we choose a place (ie the spam sponsor's web site), set a time when everybody should go there, and then at the appointed time, we all "go", ie repeatedly request the page.

Just as a million interested citizens inadvertently brought down the U.S. Affordable Care Act web site, we can bring a spammer client web site to a standstill, if enough of us want to, without doing the site itself any damage, nor breaking any law. Each participant in the sit-in is doing just what the spammer client wants us to do: go to the site.

The Sit-In app (currently available only at the SlideME android market) from earth42, facilitates each part of this process.

What's my golf handicap?

A golf handicap enables you to gauge the quality of your game and compare it to others, regardless of what course you play. As part of the Rules of Golf, the USGA has created an algorithm for calculating your handicap based on your most recent 20 games.

With the Golf Handicap Calculator (currently available only for android devices) from earth42, you can enter rating and slope parameters of golf courses you play, and then enter your score and course for each game. Once you have at least 5 games stored, it will calculate and graph your "differentials", the normalized scores, and your "handicap index"; and once you have a handicap index, the calculator can also predict your score for a stored course, or from a rating and slope that you enter.

NEWSFLASH: I have recently had a very helpful conversation with theoclitus, a user who plays nine-hole golf courses. These courses have nine-hole ratings, and the newest version, 3.0, deals with both nine-hole and eighteen-hole courses - just register the course in your list with its nine-hole rating and slope, and check the box indicating it's a nine-hole course. If you play nine on an eighteen-hole course, and they don't furnish nine-hole ratings and slopes for the front and back, you can just use the course's given rating and slope, but you must double your score when you enter the game in order to get the correct handicap index, or at least as close as you can get. There is now also a preference in Settings to choose whether to display your handicap index as eighteen-hole or nine-hole, and regardless of that, you can select nine-hole or not when predicting your score.