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That's the first thing I thought of!

The coppers smashed my father's printer when I was eight. I remember the hot, cling-film-in-a-microwave smell of it, and Da's look of ferocious concentration as he filled it with fresh goop, and the warm, fresh-baked feel of the objects that came out of it.

Also available in audio format: http://escapepod.org/2007/01/09/ep-flash-printcrime/

Other versions: http://craphound.com/?p=573 (including fan translations into Spanish, French, Italian, and Polish)

... by Cory Doctorow.

Subvocal embedded comm links, and HUDs either in contacts or also embedded. Along with everything else from Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom.

That would have been Cory Doctorow, unsurprisingly. (I like Cory.)

This stuff will be illegal as soon as it is available because it will kill the revenue stream of too many rich people.

For those who haven't read it, I highly recommend this short story by Cory Doctorow.

It should be pointed out that some excellent books published by Tor have been available as DRM and cost free downloads ( in a variety of formats) for some time.

It should be pointed out that some excellent books published by Tor have been available as DRM and cost free downloads ( in a variety of formats) for some time.

Books are just excellent.

Another more suggestion:

Take your iPod, and use the ipod e-book formatter to put some nice books on your iPod, for reading while you listen to some great music. You can even make playlists that go with the story line!

You can convert e-books here: http://www.ambience.sk/ipod-ebook-creator/ipod-book-notes-text-conversion.php

Some great books here: http://www.craphound.com/index.php?cat=5

and here: http://www.geocities.com/davidbainaa/

and here: http://www.baen.com/library/

Free, or better Creative Commons books, are regularly mentioned on Boing Boing as well.

http://www.craphound.com/est/

Protagonist is a User Interface / Experience consultant. Good story and good (albiet, non technical) commentary on interface design.

Sigh. I would have thought my quip about memes would have tipped off the mods and potential repliers. My original post was a reference to this post, which itself was a refernce to this joke, both of which are meant to be funny, not serious.

http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=383891&cid=21628795

I wrote it just two days ago for the New Wave Power Research Rising Off Oregon Coast story.

It obviously still needs to be fleshed out before it can compare to the spam solutions template, but I think it's off to a good start.

Someone needs to create something along the lines of the spam solutions template, but for new technologies (like wave power or wind farms).

I'll start:
(things in bold can be easily replaced)

Your solution advocates a

(*) technical ( ) legislative (*) market-based ( ) vigilante

approach to solving a looming energy problem. Your idea will not work. Here is why it won't work. (One or more of the following may apply to your particular idea, and it may have other flaws which used to vary from state to state or country to country before a bad federal or international law was passed.)

(*) It will be fought by entrenched fishing interests
(*) It will be fought by entrenched energy corporations
(*) It will be fought by ______________
(*) It will succumb to NIMBY Syndrome
(*) Requires immediate total cooperation from everybody at once
( ) Technology doesn't work that way
(*) NIMBY Syndrome will prevent mass deployment

Specifically, your plan fails to account for:

(*) Idiots with boats
( ) International reluctance to engage in sweeping change
(*) Technically illiterate politicians
(*) Extreme stupidity on the part of people who vote
( ) A lack of support from famous Musicians and Actors
(*) Conflicting environmental interests

and the following philosophical objections may also apply:

( ) The money could be better spent curing cancer
( ) Ideas similar to yours are easy to come up with, yet none have ever
been shown practical
(*) Feel-good measures do nothing to solve the problem
(*) Your solution is expensive
(*) Your solution may be politically infeasible
( ) The money could be better spent implementing [other] solution
( ) It makes life harder, not easier

Furthermore, this is what I think about you:

(*) Sorry dude, but I don't think it would work.
( ) This is a stupid idea, and you're a stupid person for suggesting it.
( ) Nice try, assh0le! I'm going to find out where you live and burn your house down!

You get the idea. Please improve it.
Not that I'm shitting on wave power, but NIMBY, questions about environmental impact and the fishing & energy industries could seriously crimp any offshore plans.

Found it it's like a failed decision support system that still works because there is no viable solution.

Looks like the author is Cory Doctorow

Support authors who publish their content using Creative Commons style licenses. What little writing I do is published using CC licenses, Wikipedia is moving to CC, and I never would have even heard of Cory Doctorow years ago (still one of my favorites) if not for CC.

I'm considering licensing the majority of the content on my educational resources site under a CC license. Seriously, support these kinds of effort at (1) making high-quality published works accessible to a broader audience, and (2) supporting authors who are willing to try new business models to earn a living.

You're not the first one with that thought.

Printcrime
by Cory Doctorow

Forematter:
This story is part of Cory Doctorow's 2007 short story collection "Overclocked: Stories of the Future Present," published by Thunder's Mouth, a division of Avalon Books. It is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 2.5 license, about which you'll find more at the end of this file.
This story and the other stories in the volume are available at:
http://craphound.com/overclocked
You can buy Overclocked at finer bookstores everywhere, including Amazon:
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/1560259817/downandoutint-20
In the words of Woody Guthrie:
"This song is Copyrighted in U.S., under Seal of Copyright #154085, for a period of 28 years, and anybody caught singin it without our permission, will be mighty good friends of ourn, cause we don't give a dern. Publish it. Write it. Sing it. Swing to it. Yodel it. We wrote it, that's all we wanted to do."
Overclocked is dedicated to Pat York, who made my stories better.
--
Introduction to Printcrime:
Printcrime came out of a discussion I had with a friend who'd been to hear a spokesman for the British recording industry talk about the future of "intellectual property." The record exec opined the recording industry's great and hysterical spasm would form the template for a never-ending series of spasms as 3D printers, fabricators and rapid prototypers laid waste to every industry that relied on trademarks or patents.
My friend thought that, as kinky as this was, it did show a fair amount of foresight, coming as it did from the notoriously technosqueamish record industry.
I was less impressed.
It's almost certainly true that control over the production of trademarked and patented objects will diminish over the coming years of object-on-demand printing, but to focus on 3D printers' impact on trademarks is a stupendously weird idea.
It's as if the railroad were looming on the horizon, and the most visionary thing the futurists of the day can think of to say about it is that these iron horses will have a disastrous effect on the hardworking manufacturers of oat-bags for horses. It's true, as far as it goes, but it's so tunnel-visioned as to be practically blind.
When Nature magazine asked me if I'd write a short-short story for their back-page, I told them I'd do it, then went home, sat down on the bed and banged this one out. They bought it the next morning, and we were in business.
--
Printcrime
(Originally published in Nature Magazine, January 2006)
The coppers smashed my father's printer when I was eight. I remember the hot, cling-film-in-a-microwave smell of it, and Da's look of ferocious concentration as he filled it with fresh goop, and the warm, fresh-baked feel of the objects that came out of it.
The coppers came through the door with truncheons swinging, one of them reciting the terms of the warrant through a bullhorn. One of Da's customers had shopped him. The ipolice paid in high-grade pharmaceuticals--performance enhancers, memory supplements, metabolic boosters. The kind of thing that cost a fortune over the counter; the kind of thing you could print at home, if you didn't mind the risk of having your kitchen filled with a sudden crush of big, beefy bodies, hard truncheons whistling through the air, smashing anyone and anything that got in the way.
They destroyed grandma's trunk, the one she'd brought from the old country. They smashed our little refrigerator and the purifier unit over the window. My tweetybird escaped death by hiding in a corner of his cage as a big, booted foot crushed most of it into a sad tangle of printer-wire.
Da. What they did to him. When he was done, he looked like he'd been brawling with an entire rugby side. They

You're not the first one with that thought.

Printcrime
by Cory Doctorow

Forematter:
This story is part of Cory Doctorow's 2007 short story collection "Overclocked: Stories of the Future Present," published by Thunder's Mouth, a division of Avalon Books. It is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 2.5 license, about which you'll find more at the end of this file.
This story and the other stories in the volume are available at:
http://craphound.com/overclocked
You can buy Overclocked at finer bookstores everywhere, including Amazon:
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/1560259817/downandoutint-20
In the words of Woody Guthrie:
"This song is Copyrighted in U.S., under Seal of Copyright #154085, for a period of 28 years, and anybody caught singin it without our permission, will be mighty good friends of ourn, cause we don't give a dern. Publish it. Write it. Sing it. Swing to it. Yodel it. We wrote it, that's all we wanted to do."
Overclocked is dedicated to Pat York, who made my stories better.
--
Introduction to Printcrime:
Printcrime came out of a discussion I had with a friend who'd been to hear a spokesman for the British recording industry talk about the future of "intellectual property." The record exec opined the recording industry's great and hysterical spasm would form the template for a never-ending series of spasms as 3D printers, fabricators and rapid prototypers laid waste to every industry that relied on trademarks or patents.
My friend thought that, as kinky as this was, it did show a fair amount of foresight, coming as it did from the notoriously technosqueamish record industry.
I was less impressed.
It's almost certainly true that control over the production of trademarked and patented objects will diminish over the coming years of object-on-demand printing, but to focus on 3D printers' impact on trademarks is a stupendously weird idea.
It's as if the railroad were looming on the horizon, and the most visionary thing the futurists of the day can think of to say about it is that these iron horses will have a disastrous effect on the hardworking manufacturers of oat-bags for horses. It's true, as far as it goes, but it's so tunnel-visioned as to be practically blind.
When Nature magazine asked me if I'd write a short-short story for their back-page, I told them I'd do it, then went home, sat down on the bed and banged this one out. They bought it the next morning, and we were in business.
--
Printcrime
(Originally published in Nature Magazine, January 2006)
The coppers smashed my father's printer when I was eight. I remember the hot, cling-film-in-a-microwave smell of it, and Da's look of ferocious concentration as he filled it with fresh goop, and the warm, fresh-baked feel of the objects that came out of it.
The coppers came through the door with truncheons swinging, one of them reciting the terms of the warrant through a bullhorn. One of Da's customers had shopped him. The ipolice paid in high-grade pharmaceuticals--performance enhancers, memory supplements, metabolic boosters. The kind of thing that cost a fortune over the counter; the kind of thing you could print at home, if you didn't mind the risk of having your kitchen filled with a sudden crush of big, beefy bodies, hard truncheons whistling through the air, smashing anyone and anything that got in the way.
They destroyed grandma's trunk, the one she'd brought from the old country. They smashed our little refrigerator and the purifier unit over the window. My tweetybird escaped death by hiding in a corner of his cage as a big, booted foot crushed most of it into a sad tangle of printer-wire.
Da. What they did to him. When he was done, he looked like he'd been brawling with an entire rugby side. They

...till law enforcement finds out

... in his book Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom, in which everyone has has neural hooks to the Internet, and everyone walks around with HUDdies (heads up displays) revealing their whuffie (think /. Karma points.) The only difference with Cory's world: he assumed that Free Open Source Software was everywhere, so there were no issues with patents.

Unfortunately for us all, we are not that far away from Cory Doctorow's vision, because HUDdies are already in wide-spread use, for example, in aviation, according to this Wikipedia article. So we won't be able to rely on the fact that Microsoft's patent clocks out before this technology might actually be relevant. We have all seen stories here on /. about the possibility of interacting with computers with our minds.

Coincidentally, Cory's idea of whuffie was influenced, in part, by reading /., according to Wikikpedia article. So thank you, Cmdr Taco!

Good analysis.

Of course it's also possible that he took an existing amusing checklist and added the references to Russia to it because they're relevant to this particular story. You can work this out by any of the following methods:

a) Comparing the posted version to the original linked above.
b) Noticing that the additions were made in crayon.
c) Getting a sense of humour, or borrowing one from someone who isn't using theirs.

It's also possible that not every attempt at humour is a thinly veiled assault on the former Soviet Union.

Granted, I'm not a great fan of fiction outside of Hemmingway, but damn, could you pick a more lame and boring subject?

Unwirer - The mini-sized mobile wifi devices described in it were the first thing I thought of when I read this story. Personally, I think it's an absolutely *fantastic* idea. Slap solar panel, battery, regulator, and WiFi in ad-hoc mode together, liberally slather with silicone sealant, and attach to roof of buildings!

But the idea of putting a solar power unit and radio together isn't new - so why is this news?

Money is basically a representation of a person's past value - what they've contributed to society...

What you just described is called "whuffie" by Cory Doctorow, in his story Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom. He calls the surplus-society meritocracy you describe "The Bitchun Society". The story is Freely available (Creative Commons license) at http://www.craphound.com/down/ and is well worth the read.

This was a good fight, one we could have a thousand times without resolving. I'd get him to concede that Whuffie recaptured the true essence of money: in the old days, if you were broke but respected, you wouldn't starve; contrariwise, if you were rich and hated, no sum could buy you security and peace. By measuring the thing that money really represented -- your personal capital with your friends and neighbors -- you more accurately gauged your success.

This future history book takes place in the 22nd century, mostly in Walt Disney World. Earth now lives under the "Bitchun Society", in which rejuvenation and body-enhancement have made death obsolete, material goods are no longer scarce, and everyone is granted basic rights that in our present age are mostly considered luxuries. This abundance has brought about the end of labor and money, and the only thing that makes one person worth more than anyone else is "Whuffie", a constantly updated rating that measures how much esteem and respect other people have for you. This rating system determines who gets the few scarce items, like the best housing, a table in a crowded restaurant, or a good place in a queue for a theme park attraction.

I prefer reading printed books but don't have room for very many on my bookshelf , so to save space, ebooks are a good alternative. I have sometimes had to throw out old books to make room for new ones. Of course, I always felt guilty doing that, but I did not know what else to do with them. Instead of doing that, I could easily fit an entire library of many thousands of books on one small hard drive. There are may older books, in which the copyrights have expired, as well as some occasional newer books which for various reasons are available in ebook form for free.

• Project Gutenberg
• Arthur's Classic Novels
• ManyBooks.net
• Baen Free Library
• Cory Doctorow's Free Books

I do buy occasional newer printed books too, which are not available for free, so I am still doing my share of helping to support the publishing industry.

If you're one of those, take a few of the cycles that you're spending cleaning out your inbox and think of a practical way to halt spam. Share it.

That'd be nice, but it's not possible. Unfortunately, every spam solution proposed fails for one or more of the reasons in the canonical spam solutions checklist, quoted below. I'm not intentionally being obtuse, I'm just saying that there are conflicting goals that prevent spam from being a solvable problem. For example, the rest of the world is (wisely) not going to let the U.S. dictate the future standards for email, but the current U.S. government is not going to accept a foreign-born solution that doesn't include provisions for NSA spying.

I understand completely why some people think email is useless to them. But it is not useless to the rest of us; only a very tiny minority of people are willing to give it up simply because of the S/N ratio. Some of us fight it with technological means, others who are technically unable to do so typically live with it. But pronouncing email dead because you personally haven't figured out how to cope with spam is like saying BSD is dead because you switched to Linux. Even my sister figured out that she could get a new email address and avoid the spam mistakes of her past -- and I have to believe that every slashdotter is more net-savvy than she is.

Right now, the best defense against spam is to kill these botnets. Let them have their turf wars for now, hardening their own networks against attacks from each other. Any defenses they add are better than the soft targets they originally were. Meanwhile, if the operators do get rolled up, their networks could be shut down for good, and would present no convenient targets to the other botnet operators.

Your post advocates a

( ) technical ( ) legislative ( ) market-based ( ) vigilante

approach to fighting spam. Your idea will not work. Here is why it won't work. (One or more of the following may apply to your particular idea, and it may have other flaws which used to vary from state to state before a bad federal law was passed.)

( ) Spammers can easily use it to harvest email addresses
( ) Mailing lists and other legitimate email uses would be affected
( ) No one will be able to find the guy or collect the money
( ) It is defenseless against brute force attacks
( ) It will stop spam for two weeks and then we'll be stuck with it
( ) Users of email will not put up with it
( ) Microsoft will not put up with it
( ) The police will not put up with it
( ) Requires too much cooperation from spammers
( ) Requires immediate total cooperation from everybody at once
( ) Many email users cannot afford to lose business or alienate potential employers
( ) Spammers don't care about invalid addresses in their lists
( ) Anyone could anonymously destroy anyone else's career or business

Specifically, your plan fails to account for

( ) Laws expressly prohibiting it
( ) Lack of centrally controlling authority for email
( ) Open relays in foreign countries
( ) Ease of searching tiny alphanumeric address space of all email addresses
( ) Asshats
( ) Jurisdictional problems
( ) Unpopularity of weird new taxes
( ) Public reluctance to accept weird new forms of money
( ) Huge existing software investment in SMTP
( ) Susceptibility of protocols other than SMTP to attack
( ) Willingness of users to install OS patches received by email
( ) Armies of worm riddled broadband-connected Windows boxes
( ) Eternal arms race involved in all filtering approaches
( ) Extreme profitability of spam
( ) Joe jobs and/or identity theft
( ) Technically illiterate politicians
( ) Extreme stupidity on the part of people who do business with spammers
( ) Dishonesty on the part of spammers themselves
( ) Bandwidth costs that are unaffected by client filterin

Here's Michael Ripley from back before AACS was finished.

"Backers of the protection method are betting that AACS technology will finally thwart unauthorized copying of DVDs while allowing consumers to distribute movies legitimately over networks within their homes, play them on a variety of devices (standard televisions, portable movie players, and laptop computers), and store them on home media servers. "We wouldn't be investing our time otherwise," says Michael Ripley, the chairman of the AACS alliance's technical working group."

Well, Michael(s): any high school student could've told you this would never work. The reason is the same as always: you have to provide the machine with everything it needs to play back the disc. It's difficult (college students would say "impossible") to provide those things to the machine without providing those things to the machine. Cf. Cory's age-old piece;
http://craphound.com/hpdrm.txt

And Cory Doctorow received a C&D letter for the same thing. On the advice of his lawyer he caved. I think he should get a new lawyer!

Cory Doctorow seems to be doing all right with that model.

--Rob

Cory gives his books away for free on his website. That doesn't stop him from selling a lot of copies.

http://www.craphound.com/index.php?cat=5

See for yourself.

The weirdest thing about Asimov's three laws is that they're a recipie for slavery. Asimov's robots are slaves. They have human (if not super-human) intelligence, and yet are to remain subservient in all respects. If you want, they have to kill themselves for your amusement. What the hell? If they're sentient they're no longer a tool, but rather something more, and so have to be treated like more than one, yet Asimov would have us be their rulers. Convient since we're their creators, but moral? Not really.

You must work for Microsoft

Read Cory Doctorow's overclocked which is a collection of short stories. Relevant to this technology is Printcrime and After the Siege. The stories are under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 2.5 license so give them a look.

that is so true. cory doctorow wrote a great paper on that very argument.

OK. No one got my South Park reference. I apologize. I would remove the comment if I could :(

That is the system of immortality used in the novel "Down and out in the magic kingdom".
Its published for free on the net, i saw a review on slashdot at some point though i can't find it anymore. Its actually a very good read http://www.craphound.com/down/

...for stealing his book title:

http://craphound.com/?p=189

Good job there's no shrinkwrap on books eh?

Your post advocates a
( ) technical (*) legislative ( ) market-based ( ) vigilante

approach to fighting spam. Your idea will not work. Here is why it won't work. (One or more of the following may apply to your particular idea, and it may have other flaws which used to vary from state to state before a bad federal law was passed.)

( ) Spammers can easily use it to harvest email addresses
( ) Mailing lists and other legitimate email uses would be affected
(*) No one will be able to find the guy or collect the money
( ) It is defenseless against brute force attacks
( ) It will stop spam for two weeks and then we'll be stuck with it
( ) Users of email will not put up with it
( ) Microsoft will not put up with it
( ) The police will not put up with it
(*) Requires too much cooperation from spammers
( ) Requires immediate total cooperation from everybody at once
( ) Many email users cannot afford to lose business or alienate potential employers
( ) Spammers don't care about invalid addresses in their lists
( ) Anyone could anonymously destroy anyone else's career or business

Specifically, your plan fails to account for

( ) Laws expressly prohibiting it
(*) Lack of centrally controlling authority for email
(*) Open relays in foreign countries
( ) Ease of searching tiny alphanumeric address space of all email addresses
(*) Asshats
(*) Jurisdictional problems
( ) Unpopularity of weird new taxes
( ) Public reluctance to accept weird new forms of money
( ) Huge existing software investment in SMTP
( ) Susceptibility of protocols other than SMTP to attack
( ) Willingness of users to install OS patches received by email
(*) Armies of worm riddled broadband-connected Windows boxes
( ) Eternal arms race involved in all filtering approaches
( ) Extreme profitability of spam
(*) Joe jobs and/or identity theft
( ) Technically illiterate politicians
( ) Extreme stupidity on the part of people who do business with spammers
(*) Dishonesty on the part of spammers themselves
( ) Bandwidth costs that are unaffected by client filtering
( ) Outlook

and the following philosophical objections may also apply:

(*) Ideas similar to yours are easy to come up with, yet none have ever
been shown practical
( ) Any scheme based on opt-out is unacceptable
( ) SMTP headers should not be the subject of legislation
( ) Blacklists suck
( ) Whitelists suck
( ) We should be able to talk about Viagra without being censored
( ) Countermeasures should not involve wire fraud or credit card fraud
( ) Countermeasures should not involve sabotage of public networks
( ) Countermeasures must work if phased in gradually
( ) Sending email should be free
( ) Why should we have to trust you and your servers?
( ) Incompatiblity with open source or open source licenses
(*) Feel-good measures do nothing to solve the problem
( ) Temporary/one-time email addresses are cumbersome
( ) I don't want the government reading my email
( ) Killing them that way is not slow and painful enough

Furthermore, this is what I think about you:

(*) Sorry dude, but I don't think it would work.
( ) This is a stupid idea, and you're a stupid person for suggesting it.
( ) Nice try, assh0le! I'm going to find out where you live and burn your
house down!

Thanks to Cory Doctorow for his excellent form post.

I stole the spam form from craphound (but it's everywhere and has been posted to slashdot many times).

All I actually wrote was the first paragraph & subject. 30 seconds work.

He types that fast because he's mostly filling out a form. Here it is:

http://www.craphound.com/spamsolutions.txt

The point is that there aren't any truly novel, effective spam solutions waiting out there. Whatever it is they're suggesting, it's been thought of before, or something like it, and it's already been found wanting.

We don't need to rewrite the objections from scratch, and can just re-tread the old ones by filling out the form. Somebody will fill out that form for EVERY anti-spam solution posted on Slashdot.

kinda reminds me of cory doctorow's "eastern standard tribe" [1], where ad-hoc mesh networks are formed between cars and they share music. there are many beneficial uses for ad-hoc networks. i own an linksys WRT45-GL wireless router (runs linux, of course) and participiate in the freifunk project [2] (although not very long) b/c city-wide mesh networks fascinated me the moment i heard of them. big freifunk-enabled areas are in berlin, weimar and leipzig (when you are visiting the latter, look out for BSSID "ca:ff:ee:ba:be").

i could easily imagine that some ad-hoc chatting protocol (zeroconf anyone ?) could be used to form an IRC-like chat when stuck in traffic. or someone starts to stream a movie (i am waiting for "matrix vista"). possibilities are endless.

[1] http://www.craphound.com/est/
[2] http://freifunk.net/ (german)

http://craphound.com/spamsolutions.txt

Your post advocates a

(*) technical ( ) legislative ( ) market-based ( ) vigilante

approach to fighting spam. Your idea will not work. Here is why it won't work. (One or more of the following may apply to your particular idea, and it may have other flaws which used to vary from state to state before a bad federal law was passed.)

( ) Spammers can easily use it to harvest email addresses
( ) Mailing lists and other legitimate email uses would be affected
( ) No one will be able to find the guy or collect the money
( ) It is defenseless against brute force attacks
( ) It will stop spam for two weeks and then we'll be stuck with it
( ) Users of email will not put up with it
( ) Microsoft will not put up with it
( ) The police will not put up with it
( ) Requires too much cooperation from spammers
(*) Requires immediate total cooperation from everybody at once
(*) Many email users cannot afford to lose business or alienate potential employers
( ) Spammers don't care about invalid addresses in their lists
( ) Anyone could anonymously destroy anyone else's career or business

Specifically, your plan fails to account for

( ) Laws expressly prohibiting it
(*) Lack of centrally controlling authority for email
( ) Open relays in foreign countries
( ) Ease of searching tiny alphanumeric address space of all email addresses
( ) Asshats
( ) Jurisdictional problems
( ) Unpopularity of weird new taxes
( ) Public reluctance to accept weird new forms of money
(*) Huge existing software investment in SMTP
( ) Susceptibility of protocols other than SMTP to attack
( ) Willingness of users to install OS patches received by email
( ) Armies of worm riddled broadband-connected Windows boxes
( ) Eternal arms race involved in all filtering approaches
( ) Extreme profitability of spam
( ) Joe jobs and/or identity theft
( ) Technically illiterate politicians
( ) Extreme stupidity on the part of people who do business with spammers
( ) Dishonesty on the part of spammers themselves
( ) Bandwidth costs that are unaffected by client filtering
( ) Outlook

and the following philosophical objections may also apply:

(*) Ideas similar to yours are easy to come up with, yet none have ever
been shown practical
( ) Any scheme based on opt-out is unacceptable
( ) SMTP headers should not be the subject of legislation
( ) Blacklists suck
( ) Whitelists suck
( ) We should be able to talk about Viagra without being censored
( ) Countermeasures should not involve wire fraud or credit card fraud
( ) Countermeasures should not involve sabotage of public networks
( ) Countermeasures must work if phased in gradually
( ) Sending email should be free
( ) Why should we have to trust you and your servers?
( ) Incompatiblity with open source or open source licenses
( ) Feel-good measures do nothing to solve the problem
( ) Temporary/one-time email addresses are cumbersome
( ) I don't want the government reading my email
( ) Killing them that way is not slow and painful enough

Furthermore, this is what I think about you:

( ) Sorry dude, but I don't think it would work.
( ) This is a stupid idea, and you're a stupid person for suggesting it.
( ) Nice try, assh0le! I'm going to find out where you live and burn your
house down!

http://www.craphound.com/spamsolutions.txt

He didn't invent the list. That's the kind of laziness we're looking for.

He even used it for the checklist's intended reason -- as satire. EVERYTHING fails somewhere on that list.

Yootles? I thought it was called Whuffie?!

What's Whuffie you ask? Well, click the link, and if it sounds interesting, go here and download the book Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom. (it's free)

I guess Bill finally sat down and read this thing. Best anti-DRM manifesto I've ever read:

http://www.changethis.com/4.DRM (pdf)

http://www.craphound.com/msftdrm.txt (plain text)

--b

Whuffie is the ephemeral, reputation-based currency of Cory Doctorow's sci-fi novel, Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom. This future history book describes a post-scarcity economy: All the necessities (and most of the luxuries) of life are free for the taking. A person's current Whuffie is instantly viewable to anyone, as everybody has a brain-implant giving them an interface with the Net.

Every character currently allowed is easy to generate on ALL keyboards

Not at all true, the pirates (http://www.craphound.com/images/piratekeyboard.jp g) are still struggeling.

Indeed, this example illustrates Why DRM Doesn't Work.