Due to nicely warming climate this year’s biking season has already been started (it happened on Jan 18)

As always, new season start is marked by summing up the statistical data for the previous one.

So… the season of 2006 has had the following features:

• Total Distance ridden: 2017.8 km
• First ride (season start): February 17, 2006
• Last ride (season finish): December 16, 2006
• Total riding days: 89 (22.67 km/day)
• Time on the go (wheels spinning): 140:12:54, or 5d20h12m54s
• Maximum speed (downhill on the highway): 63.0 km/h
• Average speed: 14.4 km/h
• Maximum trip distance within a day: 62.84 km
• Minimum trip distance: 1.78 km

Season’s graphs:

Odometer

Notice the perfect inverse tangent curve shape

Average & Maximum speeds

Note: the maximum of 79 km/h was a cyclometer’s fault which is running its 6th year on the original (factory loaded) battery.

And here’s my invention - an attempt to numerify (i.e. to represent numerically) the hardness of a day’s ride - currently it is calculated as Distance ridden times the day’s Average speed.

It seems to classify the “hardness”, or ride difficulty, or body burden caused, pretty well assuming terrains do not differentiate substantially

Everyone hates spam. I mean, ok, some people may actually like advertising, but spam isn’t just ads. Most spams are genuine frauds & scams. And who likes to be defrauded?

So why hasn’t it been stopped yet? Why do we see the volume of spam in our mailboxes only growing instead?

One of the markings of the past ‘06 was the drastic attempt by guys of BlueSecurity (Israel based BTW) to finally stop this vice. The idea was brilliant - to block spammers with the spammers’ methods - DDoS against the spamvertised sites (used to distribute goods - either electronic or physical), effectively stopping sales, not the innocent zombified home computers (used to promote those goods).

The plan was so huge, it hit spammers really hard, but didn’t stop spam on Earth.

Unfortunately the good guys have lost this blitzkrieg. The spammers struck back and made notable collateral damage to the whole Internet, generating quite a lot of news - on slashdot.org, Washington Post etc.

As we see, it is a multimillion-dollar business which makes tier-1 ISPs to play to their tune. This is the problem as ever more laymen are joining the Internet in coming years. The more technically unsavvy the average Internet user becomes, the more desirable target for spammers the userbase presents.

Sadly, unprofessional users are both consumers of spam and tools in hands of spammers to spread the evil.

And as long as big criminals are entering the game (see BBC report for e.g.) we are about to become witnesses of large financial interests repartition which historically leads to… wars.

Furthermore, assuming these interests are not merely large, but worldwide - just like the phenomenon of Internet economy suggests - the problem at hand (the war) provokes to be more precisely called “The World (War)”…