Δαφνη Ευτυχια Αρθουρος

Okay, so somebody I don't know sent me a four megabyte email message. It could be worse, and even though huge attachments by surprise are somewhat uncool, it seems everyone has a different notion of where the boundary of 'huge' is, and at least this time they were photos that were photos and relevant to the content, not a TIFF of a scan of a news article (I think I ranted about that one a few years ago when it happened) nor irrelevant window-dressing, and at least I'm on broadband these days. But it pushed my disk usage high enough to trigger automatic "you're getting close to your quota" email from my ISP.

Of course, they sent it to my Radix address, which forwards to my Panix address but also auto-replies saying that my address has changed and the old address will go away soon, but also saying that their mail has already been forwarded to my new address. In fact, the autoreply is sent from my Panix address because that way I could put it after the spam filtering (no sense in telling spammers I've moved; they'll find me on their own efficiently enough).

So they sent the four megabyte message again, this time directly to my new address.

I guess it was time to gzip and download a bunch of email anyhow ...(I'm safely under my disk quota again, but it did mean pulling my head out of something else I'd been working on to deal with it.) At least the photos were of something I'm interested in.

"If you talk to people who have been tortured, that gives you a pretty good idea not only as to what it does to them, but what it does to the people who do it. One of my main objections to torture is what it does to the guys who actually inflict the torture. It does bad things. I have talked to a bunch of people who had been tortured who, when they talked to me, would tell me things they had not told their torturers, and I would ask, 'Why didn't you tell that to the guys who were torturing you?' They said that their torturers got so involved that they didn't even bother to ask questions. [...] Torture becomes an end unto itself." -- Merle L. Pribbenow, former CIA interpreter who served in the Vietnam War, as quoted in "CIA Veterans Condemn Torture", by Jason Vest, National Journal, 2005-11-19