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Spammer Sentencing Guidelines Released
jfengel writes "The United States Sentencing Commission has issued its guidelines for punishment under the CAN-SPAM act (PDF, beginning on page 155). You can get 5 years for a second offense or if you're spamming for fraud, child porn or other felony, or 1 to 3 years depending on how much spam you send. If Congress doesn't say otherwise, it goes into effect November 1."
I place spammers right below murderers and birthday party clowns, but aren't these sentences a bit overkill?
Sometimes I wonder if the prison overcrowding problems aren't because they toss out 5 year sentences like candy to spammers (soon), hackers, and people who get caught with a single joint. Meanwhile the cliche of "rapist out in 3 years" continues to remain valid.
Is it all becoming about profits?
A 'Yuppie' (from 'Young Urban Professional') law is any emotional law that is passed to enforce a lifestyle affection primarily of the young and upper-middle class on the poor and lower-middle class people. It gives the Yuppie do-gooders the impression that they have addressed what they precieve to be a 'social problem' without actually doing anything about in the real world and often making the underlying problem worse.
An example would be the law that requires all children to wear bicycle helmets. Fine for yuppie mommies, they're the first to buy anything that might help protect precious little Megan and Justin. But bad for the children of the poor.
Say a cop sees a poor kid on a bicycle without a helmet. He stops the kid and gives him a big (more than $100) ticket that his parents must pay or lose their driver's license. [I know, there's no connection between the two in the real world. But yuppie mommies love to come up with creative and nasty little ways to make the poor people improve themselves i.e. see things from a yuppie mommy prespective]
The parents can't afford a $100 helmet for the kid -and- pay the ticket. So they tell the kid on the threat of a beating not to get caught by the cops for riding around the neighborhood without a helmet.
So the next time that the cops are around and see the kids riding without helmets, the kids take off in the opposite direction. Being kids, they don't look where they're going and dive right out into traffic where they get hit by a car.
The good yuppie mommies point to this incident as a reason for all kids to wear helmets and to increase the penalities on the parents of the working class children to 'encourage them to make the right choices for their children's safety'.
I know, I know, that you're all going to tell me what a shit I am and how this doesn't make any sense and , of course, kids NEED helmets and what a stupid jerk I am and how I have a serious attitude problem and how I could certainly benefit from counseling and how my own kids deserve a better parent than me and everything else...
It doesn't change the fact that we don't need any more yuppie mommie laws. You need to consider the possible side effects of any law will have before you endorse passing it.
Thank you,