" Spam e-mails touting everything from aphrodisiacs to home loans are believed to account for over 80 percent of Internet traffic."

Bullshit

Statisically pr0n and warze in the form of web, p2p and usenet news is the majority of the internet traffic. Spam accounts for about 40% of the email traffic.

Span Statistics: [link]
Traffic Statistics: [link] & [link]

Yep. I saw another statistic stating that 20% of all Internet traffic today is due to Bittorrent.

Some quotes on the nature of statistics:

"Torture numbers, and they'll confess to anything." ~Gregg Easterbrook
"Say you were standing with one foot in the oven and one foot in an ice bucket. According to the percentage people, you should be perfectly comfortable." ~Bobby Bragan, 1963
"There are three kinds of lies - lies, damned lies and statistics." ~Benjamin Disraeli, commonly misattributed to Mark Twain
"Then there is the man who drowned crossing a stream with an average depth of six inches." ~W.I.E. Gates
All these and more here:
[link]

I hate it when I fail to login before posting.

Ricky, me want cookies.

Anyhow, I'd like to know how much of Gates' spam load actually comes from the Slashdot crowd. ;)

80% of statistics are false, so odds are that this statistic is, in fact, false

47% of statistics are made up on the spot.

Apparently 100% of Foobies enjoy making snarky comments about statistics.

I was hoping people would make fun of Bill Gates himself, but sometimes ya takes what ya can get.

I bet that Bill Gates is actually a woman..

I bet about 5% of the world also believes so

Then who is he/she buying the male enhancements for?

me... not me