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[Asrg] Re: "ham" is ridiculous -was- Re: False Positive

2003-04-03 08:26:42
At 16:06 +0100 4/3/03, Matt Sergeant wrote:
On Thursday, Apr 3, 2003, at 15:41 Europe/London, Jim Youll wrote:

At 14:46 +0100 4/3/03, Matt Sergeant wrote:
On Wednesday, Apr 2, 2003, at 21:56 Europe/London, Jim Youll wrote:

I love statistics, but is it possible that not-spam could be possibly called "not spam" rather than "ham" in the research-and-report context? The word "spam" creates enough difficulty on its own without adding another "zany techie word."

"Ham" is in very common use now in the anti-spam community. I don't see any valid reason to stop using it.

It's a cute, meaningless, trite word.

And "spam" is named after a monty python sketch.

"Ham" was used by almost every single presenter at the MIT conference. It's a recent term, but it's very much in use. Language changes, welcome to the world :-)

Rrrright.
Fine.
Go for it.

I have to remind people like you, from time to time, that books like _Neuromancer_ are works of fiction. If you want to fit into the real world (which was 99.99999% not at the MIT conference) try to communicate like regular people do.

This thread should be ended now. Do whatever you want, but the "cause" still sounds like a plaything when it gets into the business of making of cute words that carry no inherent meaning (don't forget the endless, years-long debate about "what is spam" that could easily be ended if people would just qualify what the hell they are talking about rather than trying to tack a name to it)

Even if the word is "okay" to use, it's too broad, isn't it. There are myriad little problems, not one big problem. I'm properly suspicious of any "research" who presents a metric claiming to measure either "spam" or "ham" rather than clearly stating what criteria were used to classify the results.

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