Jack Thompson Spams Utah Senate, May Face Legal Action

eldavojohn writes "Yesterday, GamePolitics ran an interesting story about the Utah Senate President threatening Jack Thompson with the CAN-SPAM Act. You might recall Utah being Jack's last hope and hold-out after being disbarred in Florida and more or less made a mockery everywhere else. Well, from Utah's Senate Site, we get the picture of what Jack is up to now: spamming his last friends on the planet. The Salt Lake Tribune is reporting on Senate President Michael Waddoups' statements: 'I asked you before to remove me from your mailing list. I supported your bill but because of the harassment will not again. If I am not removed, I will turn you over to the AG for legal action.' The Salt Lake Tribune reports that Waddoups confirmed on Tuesday that he would attempt to pursue legal action under the federal CAN-SPAM Act of 2003 against Jack Thompson."

Comments

Not his first time.

[kramer]

Not long after being disbarred, Ol' Jack spammed the entire membership of the Florida Bar (all Florida lawyers) asking for personal stories about how other members have been "unfairly" targeted by the Florida Bar. I presume he wanted to start some sort of class action suit, but I haven't heard anything further about it.

First Amendment

[internic]

If I understand this correctly, Thompson was petitioning elected representatives for a particular change in law. No matter how annoying his tactics or the fact that he was asked to stop, I have to believe that any prosecution of him for these actions would be thrown out on first amendment grounds. Recall that the first amendment reads as follows (emphasis mine):

Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.

Of course, in usual Slashdot fashion, IANAL.

Re:First Amendment

[Sockatume]

Given Thompson's track record, his petition was probably anything but peaceable. He killed someone's fax machine in one of his previous crusades.

Re:This is just more proof

[Spazztastic]

I'm sure he spends all his time worying about what slashdot thinks about him (um, not). Gimme a break.

You'd be surprised. Often people who are such narcissists do care what the public thinks of them. He may have all of the bible thumpers rallying behind him, but the second that someone does say something poor about him or he doesn't get his way he does seem to react with malice.

He also sent a letter to Take-Two chairman Strauss Zelnick's attorney, addressed to Zelnick's mother, in which Thompson accused her son of "doing everything he possibly can to sell as many copies of GTA: IV to teen boys in the United States, a country in which your son claims you raised him to be a 'a Boy Scout'. ... More like the Hitler Youth, I would say."

Re:What about access to our elected officials?

[BountyX]

I believe he was sending automated mailing-list type emails although he was asked to stop. This would be different than constructing multiple emails for a single recipient; furthermore, you are more likely to run into allegations of harassment rather than prosecution by AG using CAN-SPAM. Just like with excessive calling, if such actions become harassing, a restraining order can be awarded.

Re:You're a fucking moron.

[Anonymous Coward]

Uh, dude, political and religious speech is specifically exempted in the law.

We're not talking about your feelings about the matter, we're talking about facts.

Re:Jack Thompson is right: it's NOT spam.

[Hatta]

Spam is commercial email.

No. Spam is Unsolicited Bulk Email. Content does not enter into the equation.

Re:Finally

[DJRumpy]

This guy isn't a spammer in the typical sense. He's a hack 'lawyer' that's been permanently disbarred in Florida for false statements, disparaging remarks, and humiliating litigants.

He's tried to get music banned due to explicit content, violent video games banned because they incite violence, video games declared as pornography, etc., etc., etc. You know they type. More concerned about everyone else's business rather than minding his own.

He's essentially wants to ensure that everyone else lives to his own moral standards regardless of their beliefs or how they want to raise their children.

He's just a big born-again right wing religious wack job for lack of a better term. This latest spam suit is just his latest 'label' among many.

Re:Finally

[DJRumpy]

Guessing from the info online about him, I'd say he's about out of friends, or even anyone that will tolerate him.

Eh, not so much

[Weaselmancer]

It's not surprising when a pig gets dirty. He's just found a new way to do it is all. I wouldn't be surprised if he started cold calling people on their cell phones next, or sending unsolicited faxes.

The guy has absolutely no clue when it comes to tech issues. None. This whole spam thing is yet another demonstration of that.

Nothing he does is really surprising.

cardinality

[Tetsujin]

For those who don't get it: the set of integers isn't larger than the set of natural numbers. You can define a mapping function which creates a 1:1 mapping between the set of all natural numbers and the set of all integers. (f(x) = x/2 for all even (x), f(x) = -((x-1)/2) for all odd x). Since there's a 1:1 relationship between the elements of the two sets which covers all the elements of both sets, the sets are the same size.

By way of contrast, the set of all real numbers is larger than the set of natural numbers. You can't map the set of natural numbers onto the set of real numbers because the set has both infinitely large range and infinitely small granularity. Both sets are infinite, but one's bigger than the other.

Re:cardinality

[jadrian]

Actually Rationals just like the Reals also have infinitely large rage and infinitely small granularity and yet, unlike them, they are the same size as Naturals.

Re:cardinality

[Workaphobia]

It's all because of George Cantor. He had the crazy notion that one could compare the size of infinite sets using a generalization of one way you might compare two regular finite sets: Try to find a one-to-one mapping between them. If you succeed, they are of the same size, but if one exhausts before the other, that one's smaller.

So |{1, 2, 3}| = |{a, b, c}| because there exists a one-to-one mapping between them, for instance, {(1, a),(2, b),(3, c)}; but |{1, 2}| |{a, b, c}| because there is no such mapping. We know which one is the smaller one because {1, 2} can be mapped to a subset of {a, b, c}.

In the same way, there are one-to-one mappings between the set of natural numbers {1, 2, ...} and the set of integers {0, 1, 2, ...} U {-1, -2, ...}. Here's one example: {(1, 0), (2, 1), (3, -1), (4, 2), (5, -2), (6, 3), (7, -3), ...}, counting up the natural numbers and alternating back and forth between positives and negatives on the integers. The mapping is correct because 1) No number from either set is listed twice in the mapping; and 2) every number from both sets will appear somewhere in that mapping.

We say the set of natural numbers is "countable". Any set that has the same size, or cardinality, as the set of natural numbers is also countable. Any set smaller than the natural numbers is considered countable too, but those sets are finite as the natural numbers are the smallest infinite set.

A good many sets are countable. The natural numbers, the integers, rational numbers, any k-tuple of integers for a fixed k, the set of all finite strings from a finite alphabet...

The first interesting uncountable set you would come across are the real numbers, which are pretty much every number you could form using as many decimal digits as you like, even an infinite number of non-repeating digits (like pi), with the technical detail that any infinite repeating sequence of 9s is actually redundant (9.999... = 10).

Cantor showed that the reals are uncountable with a proof technique he created known as diagonalization. This idea was later adopted by Godel for his Incompleteness Theorem, and shortly after by Turing to show that the Halting Problem is undecidable. This post is long enough so I won't go into it unless you ask, but the idea is simple enough: suppose the reals were countable, then they could be listed in an enumeration. But there's a way to construct a number that could not possibly appear in the enumeration, so we have a proof by contradiction.

Is your head still in one piece?

Re:Finally

[commodore64_love]

Don't confuse the "right wing" with the religious nutjobs. They are control freaks, whereas most of us in the right wing don't care if you smoke marijuana while watching tv, have orgies in your bedroom, or worship pagan gods.

We believe in small government and lots of individual liberty.

Re:Finally

[mdwh2]

The right is *by definition* control freaks. By definition the right are fans of big government. Hell, theocratic feudalism is the canonical right wing government. You can not have a small right wing government.

Nope, right wing economically simply means things such as capitalism, private control of the means of production and so on - as opposed to left wing, which is ideas such as socialism, state funded production, and so on.

Quite how you get from that to "big government", I frankly I have no idea. Laissez-faire capitalism and libertarianism are right wing with small Government. Communism would be an example of left wing with big Government.

You can have a *Liberal* government which is what you are attempting to describe as "right wing", but that's the center.

Liberal - as opposed to authoritarianism - is a independent axis to being economically left or right wing. You could be liberal centre, liberal left wing, or liberal right wing.

I suspect you are confusing concepts such as right-wing and liberal, with the fact that some people have overloaded these terms to mean very specific things. So some people use right-wing to mean authoritarianism - but other people use left-wing in the same sense.

I know it's nice to pretend that everyone's views can be pigeon-holed into a one dimensional axis, so that you can argue against straw men, but the real world doesn't work that way.

Left: Fundamentally agrees with that one sentence description of Liberalism, but goes further and thinks the power of the state should be used against the individual to enforce that equality.

And that isn't "big government"?

Right: Fundamentally disagrees with that sentence and feels instead that certain elites are born superior to the masses (generally based on race or religion) and that the power of the state should be used against the individual in order to enforce that inequality.

That's one description of "The Right" as used by some in the United States, but it certainly does not cover right wing views in general, especially outside of the US.

Liberalism, of course, doesn't think the power of the state should be used against the individual *at all*.

This is getting more towards anarchism, which can be left wing (e.g., anarcho-communism) or right wing (e.g., anarcho-capitalism).