Daily Archives: October 24, 2003


What do you do?

Here is an interesting list of occupations:

many are archaic. These are useful to genealogists since surnames usually originated from someone’s occupation. They also are useful to historians in general. The list is by no means complete.

Many are interesting and still in use to day.
One that does not seem to be in use today that perhaps should be is this one:

STATIST – politician

Via Languagehat.
NB: The author of the list, John J. Lacombe, II passed away in 2001. Here is a memorial statement from his family.


Wierdness

Regular readers know that I like a bit of oddity and humor now and again. I was feeling a bit of withdrawal as it has been a few days since anything has cropped up.
But thanks to Jaquandor who I hope will keep up Friday’s Burst of Weirdness there is this.
And also thanks for the link to Particles where the proprietess of Making Light has many one line links to the sacred, the profane and, yes, the wierd.


Senate Supports Spammers 97-0

Well, it sure looks this way to me.
For instance,

the bill now includes a provision, supported by some opponents of spam, that directs the Federal Trade Commission to come up with a plan for a no-spam registry.

I think the off shore spammers will love this one: a list comprised of mostly good email addresses! Yea, I know that the spammers are supposed to send in their lists for scrubbing but I suspect joes p*rn shop won’t be sending in their list.

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AOL Violates User’s Computers

I couldn’t disagree more with this guy:

Russ Cooper, a security expert with TruSecure Corp., said anyone who needs the Windows messaging function that AOL disabled ought to be smart enough to know how to reactivate it.
“I hope more and more providers do this type of proactive security,” he said, “and that we don’t condemn them for things we wish everybody would do for themselves.”

He is talking about AOL which has made changes to the system settings of more then 15,000,000 of their user’s Microsoft Window based systems without those users prior consent.

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