Congratulations. You are lucky....
I get plenty of spam, sometimes more than 20 per day, but seriously,
it only takes me about 20 seconds to ignore it all.
Sometimes when I see particularly obnoxious mail, I respond to it in
a way that might prevent it in the future, but that usually doesn't
take more than 20 minutes a day. The real question is whether I have
time to respond, and the amount of ordinary UCBE never really has
much impact on that. So it seems like luck has little to do with it.
However, I've made more than 500 posts to USENET in the past five
years, mostly from this address, so maybe I am lucky. My resume has
been on the internet for about as long, so I guess so.
If I was lucky as an attribute and not as an accident, then I would
certainly be able to get the W3C to abandon its secrecy regulations
and instead respect its conflict of interest regulations. If I was
just moderatly lucky, it seems like at least a dozen speech technology
research and development firms would have offered me work, but only
a handful have. Those are the kind of unsolicited offers that make
people really happy, so when people start talking about taking away
my ability to learn about work that needs to be done, it offends me.
Seriously, think about it. If you were laid off from a major
networking firm because you were working too hard to improve their
market share, wouldn't you love to have access to questions that
might lead you to a better job? What if all the professional lists
required people to pay before asking -- what would that do to your
supply of information about leads?
Cheers,
James