Spam Quotes

We've searched our database for all the quotes and captions related to Spam. Here they are! All 100 of them:

Tell him that we fucking reprogrammed reality. Tell him that language is a virus and that religion is an operating system and that prayers are just so much fucking spam.
Neil Gaiman (American Gods (American Gods, #1))
The Dark Forces have created countless troll farms to relentlessly spam the Internet with their agendas. Trillions of fake accounts are used to create disinformation, create a fake majority opinion about topics, bully people who are putting out information the Dark Forces don’t like, and get people arguing with each other to create negative energy.
Jasun Ether (The Beasts of Success)
Check your spam folder The prophecies might be there No? Well, I'm stumped. Bye
Rick Riordan (The Hidden Oracle (The Trials of Apollo, #1))
Krista asks,"What is it about society that disappoints you so much?" Elliot thinks, "Oh I don't know, is it that we collectively thought Steve Jobs was a great man even when we knew he made billions off the backs of children? Or maybe it's that it feels like all our heroes are counterfeit; the world itself's just one big hoax. Spamming each other with our burning commentary of bullshit masquerading as insight, our social media faking as intimacy. Or is it that we voted for this? Not with our rigged elections, but with our things, our property, our money. I'm not saying anything new. We all know why we do this, not because Hunger Games books makes us happy but because we wanna be sedated. Because it's painful not to pretend, because we're cowards. Fuck Society." "Mr. Robot" season 1 episode 1, 'ohellofriend.mov
Sam Esmail
Spam is a waste of the receivers’ time, and, a waste of the sender’s optimism.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana (The Confessions of a Misfit)
Let's set the existence-of-God issue aside for a later volume, and just stipulate that in some way, self-replicating organisms came into existence on this planet and immediately began trying to get rid of each other, either by spamming their environments with rough copies of themselves, or by more direct means which hardly need to be belabored. Most of them failed, and their genetic legacy was erased from the universe forever, but a few found some way to survive and to propagate.
Neal Stephenson (Cryptonomicon)
Blasted spam pigeons!
Kate Beaton (Hark! A Vagrant)
The internet is 95 percent porn and spam
Margaret Atwood
chromosomal dance oh, heavenly happenstance rare creation, you -Marcus (Poetry Spam #22)
Megan McCafferty (Charmed Thirds (Jessica Darling, #3))
But when I clicked over to my e-mail program, it was just another “great opportunity” spam, this time adding the words “don’t delete!” to the subject line. With a sense of perverse satisfaction, I deleted it. It was probably the only act of rebellion I’d get away with all day.
Shanna Swendson (Enchanted, Inc. (Enchanted, Inc., #1))
Like almost everyone who uses e-mail, I receive a ton of spam every day. Much of it offers to help me get out of debt or get rich quick. It would be funny if it weren’t so exciting.
Bill Gates
What are Americans still buying? Big Macs,Campbell's soup,Hershey's chocolate and Spam--the four food groups of the apocalypse.
Frank Rich
Anything that suffers and dies instead of us is Christ; if they didn't kill birds and fish they would have killed us. The animals die that we may live, they are substitute people, hunters in the fall killing the deer, that is Christ also. And we eat them, out of cans or otherwise; we are eaters of death, dead Christ-flesh resurrecting inside us, granting us life. Canned Spam, canned Jesus, even the plants must be Christ.
Margaret Atwood (Surfacing)
Some say the Internet is for porn but you know that in truth the Internet is for spam.
Charles Stross (Rule 34 (Halting State, #2))
Press Releases are spam
Jason Fried (Rework)
A love letter lost in the mail, forgotten, miss delivered and then discovered years later and received by the intended is romantic. A love letter ending up in someone's spam filter is just annoying.
B.J. Neblett
I think, therefore I spam.
Margaret Atwood (Oryx and Crake (MaddAddam, #1))
Soon we were downloading ourselves into laptops, phones or pads, freer than we had hoped, floating centrifugally across the Internet to swim alongside forgotten selfies, spam emails and porn
Cyril Wong (LONTAR #3)
I'll pluck out my eye with a pencil and eat it with a Spam and mustard sandwich IF ONLY you'll sit me at lunch today, MacKenzie!
Rachel Renée Russell (Tales from a Not-So-Fabulous Life (Dork Diaries, #1))
We have a very high churn rate, but as soon as we turn on email marketing to our user base, people will come back.” Yes, of course. The reason that people leave our service and don’t come back is that we have not been sending them enough spam. That makes total sense to me, too.
Ben Horowitz (The Hard Thing About Hard Things: Building a Business When There Are No Easy Answers)
Seriousness is for fools and poor destitute families who have lived their entire lives on spam.
Jason Krumbine (Just Dial 911 for Assistance)
What do you call a generic pitch sent out to hundreds of strangers hgoping that one will bite? Spam.
Jason Fried (Rework)
If variety is the spice of life, marriage is the big can of leftover Spam.
Johnny Carson
Me and the folks who buy my food are like the Indians -- we just want to opt out. That's all the Indians ever wanted -- to keep their tepees, to give their kids herbs instead of patent medicines and leeches. They didn't care if there was a Washington, D.C., or a Custer or a USDA; just leave us alone. But the Western mind can't bear an opt-out option. We're going to have to refight the Battle of the Little Big Horn to preserve the right to opt out, or your grandchildren and mine will have no choice but to eat amalgamated, irradiated, genetically prostituted, barcoded, adulterated fecal spam from the centralized processing conglomerate.
Michael Pollan (The Omnivore's Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals)
S.P.A.M. S.enseless P.eople A.always M.essaging
Stanley Victor Paskavich
. . . SPAM is my god. It's the only deity that can be eaten raw or fried. The stuff of Holy Communion." -- Hayden Upchurch
Neal Shusterman (UnDivided (Unwind, #4))
Tatiana fretted over him before he left as if he were a five-year-old on his first day of school. Shura, don't forget to wear your helmet wherever you go, even if it's just down the trail to the river. Don't forget to bring extra magazines. Look at this combat vest. You can fit more than five hundred rounds. It's unbelievable. Load yourself up with ammo. Bring a few extra cartridges. You don't want to run out. Don't forget to clean your M-16 every day. You don't want your rifle to jam." Tatia, this is the third generation of the M-16. It doesn't jam anymore. The gunpowder doesn't burn as much. The rifle is self-cleaning." When you attach the rocket bandolier, don't tighten it too close to your belt, the friction from bending will chafe you, and then irritation follows, and then infection... ...Bring at least two warning flares for the helicopters. Maybe a smoke bomb, too?" Gee, I hadn't thought of that." Bring your Colt - that's your lucky weapon - bring it, as well as the standard -issue Ruger. Oh, and I have personally organized your medical supplies: lots of bandages, four complete emergency kits, two QuickClots - no I decided three. They're light. I got Helena at PMH to write a prescription for morphine, for penicillin, for -" Alexander put his hand over her mouth. "Tania," he said, "do you want to just go yourself?" When he took the hand away, she said, "Yes." He kissed her. She said, "Spam. Three cans. And keep your canteen always filled with water, in case you can't get to the plasma. It'll help." Yes, Tania" And this cross, right around your neck. Do you remember the prayer of the heart?" Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me, a sinner." Good. And the wedding band. Right around your finger. Do you remember the wedding prayer?" Gloria in Excelsis, please just a little more." Very good. Never take off the steel helmet, ever. Promise?" You said that already. But yes, Tania." Do you remember what the most important thing is?" To always wear a condom." She smacked his chest. To stop the bleeding," he said, hugging her. Yes. To stop the bleeding. Everything else they can fix." Yes, Tania.
Paullina Simons (The Summer Garden (The Bronze Horseman, #3))
I would have dismissed [the email] as spam, except for the first word: urgent. People stopped flinging that word around like confetti after the Rising. Somehow, the potential for missing the message that zombies just ate your mom made offering to give people a bigger dick seem less important.
Mira Grant (Feed (Newsflesh, #1))
Survivors look back and see omens, messages they missed. They remember the tree that died, the gull that splattered onto the hood of the car. They live by symbols. They read meaning into the barrage of spam on the unused computer, the delete key that stops working, the imagined abandonment in the decision to replace it.
Joan Didion
Tell him that we have fucking reprogrammed reality. Tell him that language is a virus and that religion is an operating system and that prayers are just so much fucking spam. Tell him that or I’ll fucking kill you,” said the young man mildly, from the smoke.
Neil Gaiman (American Gods)
we have fucking reprogrammed reality. Tell him that language is a virus and that religion is an operating system and that prayers are just so much fucking spam. Tell
Neil Gaiman (American Gods)
It’s okay that you like him,” Spam says. “Serial killers are really popular. They get prison married and everything.
Sheryl Scarborough (To Catch a Killer (Erin Blake, #1))
Like doing a mash-up of Spring Awakening and Spam-a-lot.
Carey Corp (Doon (Doon, #1))
Tell him that we have fucking reprogrammed reality. Tell him that language is a virus and that religion is an operating system and that prayers are just so much fucking spam.
Neil Gaiman (American Gods)
Networking turns to spam when you stop interacting. Networking is a dialog.
Donna Huber
It’s not spam if you agree to it,” Tony said. “They just won’t have much of a choice.
John Scalzi (Lock In (Lock In, #1))
He’s the human equivalent of a spam email,
Tia Williams (Seven Days in June)
100% True Fact: Spam means; Sizzle, Pork and Mmmm. Someone tell me I'm wrong...
Skylar Blue
Don’t spam people with your words of wisdom.
Gustavo Razzetti (Stretch Your Mind: How to conquer your comfort zone one stretch at a time)
Spam is not, as some people believe, an acronym for Short, Pointless, and Annoying Messages.
Steven Pinker (The Stuff of Thought: Language as a Window into Human Nature)
I wait in front of the stadium, scrolling through Facebook on my cell phone. I swear if one more of my high school friends posts pictures of their lunch, kids, or dogs, I'm going on a spree reporting everyone as spam.
Aly Martinez (Changing Course (Wrecked and Ruined, #1))
But the western mind can't bear an opt- out option. we're going to have to re-fight the Battle of the Little Bighorn to preserve the right to opt-out, or your grandchildren and mine will have no choice but to eat amalgamated, irradiated, genetically prostituted, bar-coded, adulterated fecal spam from the centralized processing conglomerate." Joel Salatin
Michael Pollan (The Omnivore's Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals)
Maureen Dowd - that catty, third-rate, wannabe sorority queen. She's such an empty vessel. One pleasure of reading the New York Times online is that I never have to see anything written by Maureen Dowd! I ignore her hypertext like spam for penis extenders.
Camille Paglia
Tell him that we have fucking reprogrammed reality. Tell him that language is a virus and that religion is an operating system and that prayers are just so much fucking spam. Tell him that or I’ll fucking kill you,’ said the young man mildly, from the smoke.
Neil Gaiman (American Gods)
Oh, I don't know. Is it that we collectively thought Steve Jobs was a great man, even when we knew he made billions off the backs of children? Or maybe it's that it feels like all our heroes are counterfeit? The world itself's just one big hoax. Spamming each other with our running commentary of bulls**t, masquerading as insight, our social media faking as intimacy. Or is it that we voted for this? Not with our rigged elections, but with our things, our property, our money. I'm not saying anything new. We all know why we do this, not because Hunger Games books makes us happy, but because we wanna be sedated. Because it's painful not to pretend, because we're cowards.
Sam Esmail
It was an office of a guy who won’t take spam from anybody.
John Zakour (The Frost-Haired Vixen (Nuclear Bombshell, #4))
Those shitty fucks.... don't stop spamming.
Deyth Banger
over 19,000 haiku about Spam—“Spamku”—have to this date been posted online.
Jane Hirshfield (The Heart of Haiku)
There was a message at the top from aboyd@cinnamon.com. I clicked. XXXXX. That was it, just a line of Xs. I thought it was spam at first, until I realized that they were kisses. It
Paula Hawkins (The Girl on the Train)
SPAM is my god. It’s the only deity that can be eaten raw or fried.
Neal Shusterman (UnDivided (Unwind Dystology, #4))
Resumes are spam filled with action verbs which are exaggeration only
Atef Ashab Uddin Sahil
Harper took a can of Spam out of her carpetbag and hunted in the cupboard for something to spread it on.
Joe Hill (The Fireman)
while she spread gelatinous Spam on crackers.
Joe Hill (The Fireman)
. . . SPAM is my god. It's the only deity that can be eaten raw or fried. The stuff of Holy Communion." -- Hayden Upchurch
Neal Shusterman
Single word quotes on spam this author has hundreds of them.
Katrina Kahler
It is good netiquette to use domains that do not allow spam, hate, or violence. NetworkEtiquette.net
David Chiles (The Principles Of Netiquette)
I wish I were dead," whined Pepsi. "So do I," said Moxie. "May the good fairy what sits in the sky grant yer every wish," said Spam.
The Harvard Lampoon (Bored of the Rings: A Parody of J.R.R. Tolkien's Lord of the Rings)
Electricity poured though him like liquid agony, setting every nerve on fire. His body arched, his muscles going into spams, a cry tearing itself from between clenched teeth. Then Quintana stepped back, leaving Zach shaking, breathless, wanting to puke. Strangely, he found the pain easier to bear now than he had two weeks before. Perhaps it was just that he'd been through this before. Or perhaps it was the fact that his pain was buying time for the woman he loved. Why hadn't he told her? Why hadn't he told Natalie he loved her when he'd had the chance? It would've taken only a few seconds. What the hell had he been afraid of? And all at once it hit him- regret as deep and wide as the ocean. Natalie. If he died today, she would never know what she meant to him. If he died, he would never even get a shot at building a life with her, of knowing what it was like to come home every night and find someone waiting for him. Hell, he wouldn't even know whether he'd gotten her pregnant. Then don't die, McBride. Zach looked into the eyes of the man who was going to kill him. I love you, Natalie. I'm sorry I didn't tell you. Forgive me.
Pamela Clare (Breaking Point (I-Team, #5))
The mindless repetition of the word spam inspired late-1980s hackers to use it as a verb for flooding newsgroups with identical messages, and a decade later it spread from their subculture to the populace at large.
Steven Pinker (The Stuff of Thought: Language as a Window Into Human Nature)
Why is Nigerian spam so sloppy? If you’ve gotten an email from a prince offering to split millions of dollars with you, you may have noticed all the misspellings and other telltale clues that it can’t possibly be real.
Seth Godin (This Is Marketing: You Can't Be Seen Until You Learn to See)
Responding to one’s fellow social media users is an example of a broad, tricky problem, and this is why what we call “social media bots”—rogue accounts that spread spam or misinformation—are unlikely to be implemented with AI.
Janelle Shane (You Look Like a Thing and I Love You: How Artificial Intelligence Works and Why It's Making the World a Weirder Place)
—Dile que hemos reprogramado la realidad. Dile que el lenguaje es un virus y la religión un sistema operativo, y las oraciones no son más que spam. Díselo o te juro que te mato —concluyó el chico, con suavidad, parapetado tras el humo.
Neil Gaiman
When I was a teen, I liked to hang out around popular girls, I thought they had some magic, secrets that only they knew and I wanted to learn it... Though pretty soon I realized... popular girls were just like spam... they promised a lot, but only thing they had and could use were their well-built bodies and ability to apply make-up here and there. Mostly they were deceptive and had no senses... they had no idea about friendship, kindness and beauty as it is. Friendship for them was not something more than poor relations, sort of like in "God Father". Love for them was not something bigger than sex. Kindness for them was to have a kitty or a dog (which was already very rare case)... And beauty for them was... well, you can imagine. Concentrated selfishness
Galina Nelson
Mother used to shape and score the Spam, arrange the rings of pineapple, then pour a little maple syrup over it and bake it so that it came out looking almost exactly like a miniature glazed ham, and we used to have it with yams on which we melted margarine.
Trevanian (The Crazyladies of Pearl Street)
If only I'd listened to my Uncle Poo-poo and gone into dentistry," whined Pepsi. "If I'd stayed home, I'd be big in encyclopedias by now," sniffled Moxie. "And if I had ten pounds o' ciment and a couple o' sacks, you'd a' both gone for a stroll in that pond an hour ago," said Spam.
The Harvard Lampoon (Bored of the Rings: A Parody of J.R.R. Tolkien's Lord of the Rings)
We concoct neologisms (quark, meme, clone, deep structure), invent slang (to spam, to diss, to flame, to surf the web, a spin doctor), borrow useful words from other languages (joie de vivre, schlemiel, angst, machismo), or coin new metaphors (waste time, vote with your feet, push the outside of the envelope).
Steven Pinker (The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature)
Interesting fact: Though the Calm Act was unprecedented in stripping U.S. citizens of their basic Constitutional freedoms, it was surprisingly well-received in most areas of the country. In particular, its Internet censorship managed to kill off spam and trolling on the social networks. The sharing of cat videos continued undisturbed. For
Ginger Booth (Dust of Kansas (Calm Act Genesis))
The success of social media companies largely depends on our failure not to spend too much time on their platforms.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
In nearly all cases, the person who is in control of that address can reset the password of any associated services or accounts—merely by requesting a password reset email.
Brian Krebs (Spam Nation: The Inside Story of Organized Cybercrime — from Global Epidemic to Your Front Door)
What are you lying about now, devil,” she rasped, coughing when the blood filled up her throat again. Dark fury flashed in his eyes and iron fingers dug into her jaw. She screamed and writhed, fighting to escape the point of metal filling her vision. She screamed as he pressed it into her eye, drilling through her eyeball. She clenched her fists and jolted under the straps, her body going into spams of agony. “How
Lucian Bane (Desecrating Solomon (Desecration, #3))
Is spam annoying? Yes. Is it becoming the cockroach of American commerce, breeding and scurrying everywhere? Yes. Because spam works, Craig. It pulls the plow. In the not-too-distant future, spam may decide elections. If I were a younger man, I’d take this new income stream by the balls . . .” He closed one of his hands. He could only make a loose fist because of his arthritis, but I got the idea. “. . . and I would squeeze.
Stephen King (If It Bleeds)
It is especially critical that you avoid processed meats such as frankfurters, bologna, salami, lunch meat, beef jerky, smoked fish, bacon, sausage, ham, pepperoni, SPAM and others that are preserved with nitrites. Why? Because this chemical is a potent anti-immunity, cancer-causing chemical. When possible, reach for meats that are nitrite-free, which does include certain brands of hot dogs, bacon, sausage and ham among others.
Michael Savage (Diseases without Borders: Boosting Your Immunity Against Infectious Diseases from the Flu and Measles to Tuberculosis)
Do you use online or “cloud” file storage services like Dropbox, Google Drive, or Microsoft SkyDrive to back up or store your pictures, files, and music? The key to unlocking access to those files also lies in your inbox.
Brian Krebs (Spam Nation: The Inside Story of Organized Cybercrime — from Global Epidemic to Your Front Door)
And do you know what that goal is?" I went for the most obvious choice: "Creating microburst hypnotropic flash-spam on a global scale?" "Immortality, Mr. Cséjthe!" he exclaimed. Oh, too bad . . . Tell me that you've invented the next big marketing technology of the twenty-first century and you've got my attention. But "Immortality"? Why not throw "World Domination" in and cackle like a demented madman? Demented madman—now there was a nice redundancy . . .
Wm. Mark Simmons (Habeas Corpses (The Halflife Chronicles, Book 3))
In this way the extortion game is similar to the economics of sending spam e-mail. When receiving an e-mail promising a share of a lost Nigerian inheritance or cheap Viagra, nearly everyone clicks delete. But a tiny number takes the bait. Computer scientists at the University of California–Berkeley and UC–San Diego hijacked a working spam network to see how the business operated. They found that the spammers, who were selling fake “herbal aphrodisiacs,” made only one sale for every 12.5 million e-mails they sent: a response rate of 0.00001 percent. Each sale was worth an average of less than $100. It doesn’t look like much of a business. But sending out the e-mails was so cheap and easy—it was done using a network of hijacked PCs, which the fraudsters used free of charge—that the spammers made a healthy profit. Pumping out hundreds of millions of e-mails a day, they had a daily income of about $7,000, or more than $2.5 million a year, the researchers figured.3
Tom Wainwright (Narconomics: How to Run a Drug Cartel)
Anyone who hunts, the pair told me, eats organs. Though the Inuit (in Canada, the term is preferred over Eskimo) gave up their nomadic existence in the 1950s, most adult men still supplemented the family diet with hunted game, partly to save money. In 1993, when I visited, a small can of Spork, the local Spam, cost $2.69. Produce arrives by plane. A watermelon might set you back $25. Cucumbers were so expensive that the local sex educator did his condom demonstrations on a broomstick.
Mary Roach (Gulp: Adventures on the Alimentary Canal)
Hey! Raster!” Raster is so glad to be wanted that he does figure eights around the screen. “Calculator!” I shout. “No need, boss! Simply tell me your desired calculation, and I will do it in my head!” So I have a most tedious conversation with Raster, in which I estimate the number of cubic feet in Soldier Field, rounded to the nearest foot. I ask Raster to multiply that by 24,808 and he shoots back: 537,824,167,717. A nongeek wouldn’t have thought twice. But I say, “Raster, you have Spam for brains. It should be an exact multiple of eight!” Evidently my brother’s new box came with one of those defective chips that makes errors when the numbers get really big.
Jared Shurin (The Big Book of Cyberpunk)
Dead of Winter: We’d pushed them all day. Not that Thanatos needed rest. Thanatos bench pressed three eighty and ate bricks for fun. They had better hope they couldn’t catch that stallion. Thanatos bench pressed three eighty and made Bagger Spam with his hooves. Death had laughed at the idea of trailering his horse. Which was understandable, considering what that stallion had done to those chronicle-seeking clones. Thanatos bench pressed three eighty and left us a pile of carnate chum Arcana Rising: Death charged into the clearing on Thanatos. The warhorse had survived as well. I shouldn’t have been surprised. Thanatos bench-pressed three-eighty and swished his tail at floods.
Kresley Cole (Dead of Winter (The Arcana Chronicles, #3))
Pen, you really shouldn’t use the same password for all your accounts. I’ve headed off three hackers in the last week who would’ve gotten into your PayPal, bank, and electric company accounts.” “What?” Penelope was obviously confused at the change in subject, but Cade merely relaxed back in his seat and kept his eyes on Beth as she fidgeted uncomfortably. “Using PenisGod isn’t a good username for things like Amazon and eBay. And you really need to delete your craigslist account because calling yourself a penis god is only attracting weirdos. You probably don’t even remember you had that old ad up when you were trying to sell your bicycle. Well, it’s one of the most clicked-on ads on the site for San Antonio. I’m not exaggerating either. You had four hundred and sixty-nine messages—and I’m not even going to comment on the sixty-nine thing. But three hundred and fourteen of those contained pictures of men’s dicks. Fifty-seven contained marriage proposals, most from overseas; twenty-seven were from women who were interested in a threesome with you, fifty-five were spam, people trying to get you to click on links or buy some crap product, and the remaining sixteen emails were religious in nature, telling you to repent for your soul.” “I should probably be pissed you got into my account, but I trust you, so I’m not. But it’s not penis god!” Penelope exclaimed huffily. “It’s Pen IS God.” Cade burst out laughing. “Seriously, sis? Penis god? Just wait until the guys hear this!
Susan Stoker (Shelter for Elizabeth (Badge of Honor: Texas Heroes, #5))
My mother the friend, benefactor, and beneficiary of white liberal women said these things about white liberals: “Your average white liberal would die before she sat down to a raccoon and squirrel dinner with some illiterate shotgun-shack Arkansas white folks who believe the Good Lord is their one and only savior. But that same white liberal will happily eat fried SPAM and white bread with a Lakota Sioux shaman who never graduated high school, and give him a highly transcendent blow job after dinner.” “White pacifist liberals in favor of gun control will race from their latest antiwar demonstration to rally for the American Indian Movement, a radical Indian organization that accomplished much of its mission through gunfire and threat of gunfire.
Sherman Alexie (Ten Little Indians: Stories)
She had been maimed by an illness that was so far out of fashion it might have been a wartime recipe for pink blancmange made from cornflour when everyone these days ate real chocolate mouse and tiramisu. TB was Spam fritters and two-bar electric fires and mangles and string bags and French knitting and a Bakelite phone in a freezing hall and loose tea and margarine and the black of the newspaper coming off on your fingers and milk in glass bottles and books from Boots Lending library with a hole in the spine where they put the ticker, and doilies and antimacassars and the wireless tuned to the Light Programme. It was outside lavatories and condensation and slum dwellings and no supermarkets. It was tuberculosis, which had died with the end of people drinking nerve tonics and Horlicks.
Linda Grant (The Dark Circle)
During those last few months, the writer Patrick Weekes would take builds of Inquisition home and let his nine-year-old son play around with the game. His son was obsessed with mounting and dismounting the horse, which Weekes found amusing. One night, Weekes’ son came up and said he’d been killed by a bunch of spiders, which seemed strange—his son’s characters were too high a level to be dying to spiders. Confused, Weekes loaded up the game, and sure enough, a group of spiders had annihilated his son’s party. After some poking around, Weekes figured out the problem: if you dismounted the horse in the wrong place, all your companions’ gear would disappear. “It was because my son liked the horse so much more than anyone else had ever or will ever like the horse,” Weekes said. “I doubt we would’ve seen it, because it takes spamming the button to figure out there’s a one-in-one-thousand chance that if you’re in the right place, it’s going to wipe out your party members.
Jason Schreier (Blood, Sweat, and Pixels)
Most people haven't been to Paris at all." "Not unless you're counting Paris, Texas." "Or Paris, Illinois." "Paris, Maine," Neil countered. "Paris, Idaho," I added with a nod. "And Paris, Arkansas." "There's a Paris, Arkansas?" Neil asked, eyebrows high. "Yup. Kentucky, too. And a couple others..." "How do you know this?" "A potent blend of Where in America Is Carmen Sandiego?, curiosity, and the Internet." "Who said technology never offered anything useful?" "I'm guessing victims of e-mail scams.
Hillary Manton Lodge (Reservations for Two (Two Blue Doors #2))
After loud overtures from his daughters, Anthony finally left the house and went up the winding path to the “museum,” to the mobile home where he and his parents had lived from 1949 to 1958. It has been left untouched. The furniture, tables, the paint on the walls, the ’50s cabinets, the dressers, the closets, are all unchanged, remaining as they once were. And in her closet in the bedroom, past the nurse’s uniform, far away in the right-hand corner on the top shelf, lies the black backpack that contains Tatiana’s soul. Every once in a while when she can stand it—or when she can’t stand it—she looks through it. Alexander never looks through it. Tatiana knows what Anthony is about to see. Two cans of Spam in the pack. A bottle of vodka. The nurse’s uniform she escaped from the Soviet Union in that hangs in plastic in the museum closet, next to the PMH nurse’s uniform she nearly lost her marriage in. The Hero of the Soviet Union medal in the pack, in a hidden pocket. The letters she received from Alexander—including the last one from Kontum, which, when she heard about his injuries, she thought would be the last one. That plane ride to Saigon in December 1970 was the longest twelve hours of Tatiana’s life. Francesca and her daughter Emily took care of Tatiana’s kids. Vikki, her good and forgiven friend, came with her, to bring back the body of Tom Richter, to bring back Anthony. In the backpack lies an old yellowed book, The Bronze Horseman and Other Poems. The pages are so old, they splinter if you turn them. You cannot leaf, you can only lift. And between the fracturing pages, photographs are slotted like fragile parchment leaves. Anthony is supposed to find two of these photographs and bring them back. It should take him only a few minutes. Cracked leaves of Tania before she was Alexander’s. Here she is at a few months old, held by her mother, Tania in one arm, Pasha in the other. Here she is, a toddler in the River Luga, bobbing with Pasha. And here a few years older, lying in the hammock with Dasha. A beaming, pretty, dark-haired Dasha is about fourteen. Here is Tania, around ten, with two dangling little braids, doing a fantastic one-armed handstand on top of a tree stump. Here are Tania and Pasha in the boat together, Pasha threateningly raising the oar over her head. Here is the whole family. The parents, side by side, unsmiling, Deda holding Tania’s hand. Babushka holding Pasha’s, Dasha smiling merrily in front.
Paullina Simons (The Summer Garden (The Bronze Horseman, #3))
Between 2003 and 2008, Iceland’s three main banks, Glitnir, Kaupthing and Landsbanki, borrowed over $140 billion, a figure equal to ten times the country’s GDP, dwarfing its central bank’s $2.5 billion reserves. A handful of entrepreneurs, egged on by their then government, embarked on an unprecedented international spending binge, buying everything from Danish department stores to West Ham Football Club, while a sizeable proportion of the rest of the adult population enthusiastically embraced the kind of cockamamie financial strategies usually only mooted in Nigerian spam emails – taking out loans in Japanese Yen, for example, or mortgaging their houses in Swiss francs. One minute the Icelanders were up to their waists in fish guts, the next they they were weighing up the options lists on their new Porsche Cayennes. The tales of un-Nordic excess are legion: Elton John was flown in to sing one song at a birthday party; private jets were booked like they were taxis; people thought nothing of spending £5,000 on bottles of single malt whisky, or £100,000 on hunting weekends in the English countryside. The chief executive of the London arm of Kaupthing hired the Natural History Museum for a party, with Tom Jones providing the entertainment, and, by all accounts, Reykjavik’s actual snow was augmented by a blizzard of the Colombian variety. The collapse of Lehman Brothers in late 2008 exposed Iceland’s debts which, at one point, were said to be around 850 per cent of GDP (compared with the US’s 350 per cent), and set off a chain reaction which resulted in the krona plummeting to almost half its value. By this stage Iceland’s banks were lending money to their own shareholders so that they could buy shares in . . . those very same Icelandic banks. I am no Paul Krugman, but even I can see that this was hardly a sustainable business model. The government didn’t have the money to cover its banks’ debts. It was forced to withdraw the krona from currency markets and accept loans totalling £4 billion from the IMF, and from other countries. Even the little Faroe Islands forked out £33 million, which must have been especially humiliating for the Icelanders. Interest rates peaked at 18 per cent. The stock market dropped 77 per cent; inflation hit 20 per cent; and the krona dropped 80 per cent. Depending who you listen to, the country’s total debt ended up somewhere between £13 billion and £63 billion, or, to put it another way, anything from £38,000 to £210,000 for each and every Icelander.
Michael Booth (The Almost Nearly Perfect People: Behind the Myth of the Scandinavian Utopia)
Electronic mail systems can, if used by many people, cause severe information overload problems. The cause of this problem is that it is so easy to send a message to a large number of people, and that systems are often designed to give the sender too much control of the communication process, and the receiver too little control…. People get too many messages, which they do not have time to read. This also means that the really important messages are difficult to find in the large flow of less important messages. In the future, when we get larger and larger message systems, and these systems get more and more interconnected, this will be a problem for almost all users of these systems.
Jacob Palme (The Information: A History, a Theory, a Flood)
Summary The key to getting subscribers to open and read your email lies in five main factors: Making sure your emails get through spam and greymail filters by keeping them on topic and high value. Quickly establishing a reputation for sending valuable, entertaining emails that your subscribers want to read so that opening your emails becomes a habit. Using subject lines which promise benefits and invoke curiosity and following that up in the first few lines of the email. Making sure your emails look easy to read across all devices. Sending your emails when your subscribers are likely to have less in their inbox.
Ian Brodie (Email Persuasion: Captivate and Engage Your Audience, Build Authority and Generate More Sales With Email Marketing)
The icons light up on his laptop, e-mail invites him to grow his penis, enlarge his breasts, refinance his house. All is well in the world.
Andrei Codrescu (Wakefield)
As of February 2017, there were 3.7 billion users of email services worldwide, and every day 269 billion emails are sent. Broken down, this equates to 2.5 million emails sent every second and trillions of emails sent each year. An estimated 49.7% of all emails are spam messages, and the average person who works in an office receives over 120 emails each day. The email system has been around since 1971, and the highest open rates of email take place on Saturdays. Out of all the companies that send emails to users, Groupon is the company that sends the most emails per user. Only 22.8% of people open political emails, while between 13 and 18% of marketing emails are opened in
Bill O'Neill (The Fun Knowledge Encyclopedia: The Crazy Stories Behind the World's Most Interesting Facts (Trivia Bill's General Knowledge Book 1))
The latest casualties of the march of technological progress are: the high-street clothes shop, the flushing water closet, the Main Battle Tank, and the first generation of quantum computers. New with the decade are cheap enhanced immune systems, brain implants that hook right into the Chomsky organ and talk to their owners through their own speech centers, and widespread public paranoia about limbic spam. Nanotechnology has shattered into a dozen disjoint disciplines, and skeptics are predicting that it will all peter out before long. Philosophers have ceded qualia to engineers, and the current difficult problem in AI is getting software to experience embarrassment. Fusion power is still, of course, fifty years away.
Charles Stross
and many tough life choices, Gwen must decide who or what she will become. Fleet Cadet or Civilian? Friend or lover? Average or extraordinary? Can she make new friends? Can she trust the old ones, such as Logan Sangre, her sexy high school crush and an Earth special operative? Time and time again, Gwen’s uncanny ability to come up with the best answer in a crisis saves her life and others. And now, her unique Logos voice makes her an extremely valuable commodity to the Atlanteans—so much so that her enigmatic commanding officer Aeson Kassiopei, who is also the Imperial Prince of Atlantis, has taken an increasingly personal interest in her. Before the end of the journey, Gwen must convince him that she has what it takes to compete in the deadly Games of the Atlantis Grail. It’s becoming apparent—the life of her family and all of Earth depends on it. COMPETE is the second book in The Atlantis Grail series. Don’t miss another book by Vera Nazarian! Subscribe to the mailing list to be notified when the next books by Vera Nazarian are available. We promise not to spam you or chit-chat, only make occasional book release announcements.
Vera Nazarian (Compete (The Atlantis Grail, #2))
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Patrick Logan (Butterfly Kisses (Detective Damien Drake, #1))
I never got over the shock of discovering that it was basically impossible to burn a blog. No matter how many time I had been caught leaking bad info, spinning, spamming, manufacturing news, it never changed anything. The same bloggers continued to cover my stories and bite when I created the news. They dont mind be deceived, not at all. In fact. it often made for a bonus story behind how we got the story wrong post.
Ryan Holiday (Trust Me, I'm Lying: Confessions of a Media Manipulator)
This is because computer science has traditionally been all about thinking deterministically, but machine learning requires thinking statistically. If a rule for, say, labeling e-mails as spam is 99 percent accurate, that does not mean it’s buggy; it may be the best you can do and good enough to be useful. This difference in thinking is a large part of why Microsoft has had a lot more trouble catching up with Google than it did with Netscape. At the end of the day, a browser is just a standard piece of software, but a search engine requires a different mind-set.
Pedro Domingos (The Master Algorithm: How the Quest for the Ultimate Learning Machine Will Remake Our World)
Decision trees instead ensure a priori that each instance will be matched by exactly one rule. This will be the case if each pair of rules differs in at least one attribute test, and such a rule set can be organized into a decision tree. For example, consider these rules: If you’re for cutting taxes and pro-life, you’re a Republican. If you’re against cutting taxes, you’re a Democrat. If you’re for cutting taxes, pro-choice, and against gun control, you’re an independent. If you’re for cutting taxes, pro-choice, and pro-gun control, you’re a Democrat. These can be organized into the following decision tree: A decision tree is like playing a game of twenty questions with an instance. Starting at the root, each node asks about the value of one attribute, and depending on the answer, we follow one or another branch. When we arrive at a leaf, we read off the predicted concept. Each path from the root to a leaf corresponds to a rule. If this reminds you of those annoying phone menus you have to get through when you call customer service, it’s not an accident: a phone menu is a decision tree. The computer on the other end of the line is playing a game of twenty questions with you to figure out what you want, and each menu is a question. According to the decision tree above, you’re either a Republican, a Democrat, or an independent; you can’t be more than one, or none of the above. Sets of concepts with this property are called sets of classes, and the algorithm that predicts them is a classifier. A single concept implicitly defines two classes: the concept itself and its negation. (For example, spam and nonspam.) Classifiers are the most widespread form of machine learning. We can learn decision trees using a variant of the “divide and conquer” algorithm. First we pick an attribute to test at the root. Then we focus on the examples that went down each branch and pick the next test for those. (For example, we check whether tax-cutters are pro-life or pro-choice.) We repeat this for each new node we induce until all the examples in a branch have the same class, at which point we label that branch with the class.
Pedro Domingos (The Master Algorithm: How the Quest for the Ultimate Learning Machine Will Remake Our World)
What a mystery we are to ourselves, even as we go on, learning more, sorting it out a little. The further on we go, the more meaning there is but the less articulable. You live your life, and the older you get – the more specificity you harvest – the more precious becomes every ounce and spam. Your life and times don’t drain of meaning because they become more contradictory, ornamented by paradox, inexplicable. Rather the opposite, maybe. The less explicable, the more meaning. The less a mathematics equation (a sum game); the more like music (significant secret).
Gregory Maguire (Out of Oz (The Wicked Years, #4))
I take my food very seriously. Whenever I hear that bell, I know Mrs. Norris is hankerin' for some spam.
Sandy Ward Bell (Parked at the Mansfields')
Anyone who hunts, the pair told me, eats organs. Though the Inuit (in Canada, the term is preferred over Eskimo) gave up their nomadic existence in the 1950s, most adult men still supplemented the family diet with hunted game, partly to save money. In 1993, when I visited, a small can of Spork, the local Spam, cost $2.69. Produce arrives by plane. A watermelon might set you back $25. Cucumbers were so expensive that the local sex educator did his condom demonstrations on a broomstick. I
Mary Roach (Gulp: Adventures on the Alimentary Canal)
Now all this may sound like hokey child’s play as most would say but you look at them and ask and they don’t even have a penny to their name and eating spam or faking it in public on credit cards
James D. Wilson
He nodded. "Yes, but you know our captain. She lives off danger like a grunt lives off Spam." At the thought of Spam, he cringed. Addy had loved the stuff. Addy—taken captive by the marauders. Addy—his best friend, the person he loved most in the world. A prisoner of war. Kemi seemed to see his pain. "We'll get her back, Marco. We'll find the Ghost Fleet. We'll raise that armada and defeat the marauders. And we'll get Addy back. I promise you.
Daniel Arenson (Earth Shadows (Earthrise, #5))