Spurious Transitions

This is a just an angry outburst at a common practice driven by an almost irrational logic. It has been nagging me for quite a while and I have to put it down somewhere.

emails are everywhere around us. Office work revolves around email and telephone with a lot of information transacted in this form. Official documents, explanatory images, illustrative media, useless forwards, unwanted spam and ofcourse plain text is transmitted and received in huge quantities every second.

But something irks me whenever I see it- a very short text message almost like an sms, no longer than a sentence sent by email, and whats more a inexplicably long 'Disclaimer note' (sometimes 2 paragraphs long) automatically appended by the company's mail server to every outgoing mail.

When I see such a thing my weird mind penetrates the physical layers of networking and stands as a silent observer of the atrocity taking place at a micro level- Every ASCII character is 8 or 16 bytes long and for each character the bits toggle by about half the number of bits. Much of our logic circuitry is CMOS based which means the major consumption is dynamic and occurs where there is toggling of bits. An sample disclaimer(found below) is 432 characters long.

Imagine The Amount Of Switching Taking Place (ITAOSTP) for each email sent by an employee in the mail server.
ITAOSTP when each email passed through a network with its own series of repeaters, routers and switches.
ITAOSTP when the email goes thru external network and the internet, passing thru more cables and repeaters.
ITAOSTP when the email reaches the other end till it reaches the screen of the receiver
ITAOSTP when the email has multiple recipients in various locations.
ITAOSTP when each employee sends tens of mails per day
ITAOSTP when the mails and sent back and forth thru reply-alls and cc-s and bcc-s.
ITAOSTP when all the mails sent by all the employees of an organisation have the same dumb disclaimer note.
ITAOSTP when many big organisations have mail servers adding their own fanciful disclaimer notes.

I cannot imagine the amount of energy wasted this way. I dont even want to imagine about the congestion and time overhead caused by the disclaimers.

All said and written, these responsible thoughts never occur to me whenever I recieve an multiple-MB videoclip as a forward - the content being something like'Planets funniest animals' or 'wacky commercial for cola' . I never understood why !!

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"Note: If the reader of this message is not the intended recipient, or an employee or agent responsible for delivering this message to the intended recipient, you are hereby notified that any dissemination, distribution or copying of this communication is strictly prohibited. If
you have received this communication in error, please notify us immediately by replying to the message and deleting it from your computer. Thank you. "