Junk mail and chain letters
http://www.symantec.com/avcenter/hoax.html
Many researchers new to the internet get "junk" e-mail all the time. And
many times they will receive mail that has been forwarded to death warning
of dire consequences from various diabolical viruses. BEFORE you decide
to do all your friends a dubious favor and yourself be a contributor to
junking up the internet and your friends' mailboxes, please take a minute
to check Symantic's website describing virus hoaxes. Trust me, you are
not going to get $800 from Microsoft no matter how much money
Bill Gates gives away.
Remember, it's against the rules to 'warn' subscribers to the Denmark
list of possible virus alerts by posting to the list. The servers at Rootsweb
are monitored closely for viruses and they are cleaned up as soon as they
are detected. It is also against the rules to forward to the list any
kind of chain letter no matter how moving it may be. Doing so can result
in immediately being unsubscribed.
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Shouting
Another internet convention concerns the use of ALL CAPS when posting
messages. Many people new to sending messages in e-mail are also new to
"keyboarding." Because they may not be the greatest typists
in the world (and many of us are not), some people think that typing in
ALL CAPS is better because that way they don't have to worry about capitalization
(or the lack of it). What they don't realize is that the use of ALL CAPS
in the computer world is considered SHOUTING. The reason why makes sense
if you think about it. Notice as you read this paragraph, the words typed
in ALL CAPS tend to "jump" out at you with added emphasis. Early
chat room users looked for various ways to add emotion to their virtual
converstions. One way was the use of "emoticons." We have all
seen these. Examples are :-) for a smile and :-P for sticking one's tongue
out and ;-) for a wink. They also made extensive use of acronyms which
made typing conversations faster (i.e. BTW for "by the way"
and BRB for "be right back" and LOL for "laughing out loud").
Finally, the use of ALL CAPS came to mean the person was saying what was
typed in all caps in a very loud voice. That is why when veteran internet
users see a message typed completely in capital letters, they envision
the writer shouting the message across the phone lines and we all dislike
folks shouting at us. ;-) So the nice thing to do when posting messages
is to take the time to make upper case and lower case letters and DON'T
SHOUT!
:-D <big grin>
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