The very meaning of a privacy right is a restriction on the copying activity of people who have access to that information.
So do you think that a patient is damaged when a doctor gives copies of their medical records to a journalist, or not?
How do you reconcile that with your position that every person can make copies of any information that they possess and share those copies with other people?
That is: how come your position doesn't apply to your doctor?
You have no inherent right to restrict what other people copy.
Sure I do. I have a right to restrict what my doctor does with my medical records. I have the right to restrict what copies you make of the GPL software that I create.
These are legal rights (which you do not dispute), but I believe they have a foundation in moral rights (which obviously we disagree on).
And I'm just an American. I hear that Europeans have even more privacy rights. A privacy right, after all, is simply a restriction on what other people can copy.
You are right, I did miss that point. The customer pays sales tax on $350 and does not receive a sales tax credit on the $75 rebate.
The company does not care whether or not I more in taxes to the government.
I think you are wrong about that -- the additional tax shfits the equilibrium point. I.e., in a 6% jurisdiction, the $350 gadget with a rebate has a total price of $296, but the $275 gadget as a total price of $291.50. Either way, the manufacturer plus the retailer receive $275. But they will sell a few less units at $296 than they will at $291.50. So they have to lower their price a bit and sell fewer units too.
(Insert standard supply-and-demand figure with government tax shown as a vertical bar... add standard argument about the effect of a change in the bar.)
You are right, it does improve revenue (the top line). To get picky, it does not improve the balance sheet, not even temporarily if the accounting is honest (the liability for the rebate should accrue at the same time as the revenue from the sale).
And some people, like me, do look at the top-line revenue of a company to figure out whether it is really growing or not. Because a company can play lots of games to shuffle expenses around to manage their earnings, but it's harder to manage their revenue.
You are right about both #1 and #2. I did mention #2.
On the accounting side, let me put an accounting-geek green eyeshade on:
"Revenue" = total sales "Expense" = raw materials, employee salaries, advertising, and so on "Income" = "Revenue" - "Expense"
A person with a regular job has expenses of $0, so their income is the same as their revenue. That leads to confusion between "revenue" and "income". But a company almost always has expenses, and so do lots of people, so income revenue. Indeed it's possible for income 0, but it's not possible for revenue 0.
If the company makes the item for $100, sells it for $350, and then pays out a $75 rebate, they have $175 of net income. They have to pay taxes on that.
If the company makes the item for $100 and sells it for $275 then they pay taxes on $175 of income.
To put it in your terms -- the company has to pay taxes on the "more revenue" they got through having a higher list price. You forgot about that part when you were thinking about the tax benefit of mailing the customer a check. The two things offset.
You are right about the personal information. Who's the best prospect for buying a new model of iPod? Someone who bought an iPod two years ago, of course!
Plus there is some percentage of people who buy the product but don't get the rebate. But nn the other hand, there are customers like you and me who say "ahhh, fuck it" on a $350 product with a $75 rebate, but we would just buy the damn thing for $275, so the rebate does lose them some sales compared to a simple flat price.
[I'm only about one or two Scientific American articles ahead of you, so let's hope that a real molecular biology geek shows up].
This is what antibodies are for. You need to make an antibody that has a very high specific affinity for the virus and a lower affinity for friendly cells. (Nature does this by generating large numbers of antibodies at random, then filtering out antibodies that show reactivity with your own cells. All the rest are let loose in the body).
Then you attach the magnetized tag on the other end of the antibody.
The antibody attaches to the virus in a death grip, and then the little black box can filter out the magnetized tag.
You don't have to remove 100% of the virus load to cure somebody. You just have to get a lot of the virus so that the body's natural immune system can fight the rest.
Indeed, other groups have tried the antibody idea with different payloads, such as a radioactive atom bonded onto the antibody. The antibody attaches to the virus or the cancer cell, then the radioactive atom decays right there next to the bad cell.
Many, many people behave in the future as they did in the past. About 70% to 80% of all the people who vote next time are going to vote the same way that they did last time.
Politicians know these trends and act accordingly.
Your whole argument looks profoundly stupid in light of the actions of the people who actually run, and win, elections. They pay a great deal of attention to redistricting.
What do you think of the Democratic state legislators in Texas who physically left the state in order to prevent the legislature from having a quorom? They think that redistricting is important. Do you think they are wildly misguided about the power of drawing the district lines?
It has gone the other way in the past. In 1960, the Democratic margin of victory in Illinois was smaller than the amount of vote fraud that went on in Chicago. Nixon chose to concede the election rather than put the country through a constitutional crisis -- perhaps the only decent thing he ever did in his public career.
You're right, though. The New York Times sponsored a post-election recount of the paper ballots (yay paper ballots). Theie study came out with the result that the NY Times didn't want to see, so they barely mentioned that their study had finished, and that, according to their count, Bush got more votes.
A "server" in 1981 would be something like a PDP-11 or Vax on the low end. Such machines were more expensive than desktop computers, and had larger physical address spaces. Even a modest PDP-11/70 had 22 address bits.
Most people preferred to spend $2000 on a PC with a 16-bit address space rather than $10000 on a PDP-11 with a 22-bit address space.
I think that 20 address bits were plenty for 1981. The real problem was that there was no upgrade path for about 10 years after that. The Intel 8086 was 20 bits, fine. The Intel 80186 was 20 bits, okay. The Intel 80286 had "protected mode" addressing to increase the addres space, but it was nearly impossible for an operating system to context switch between "protected mode" and "real mode" (there was no instruction to do it, so an OS had to actually REBOOT THE PROCESSOR and then recover all its state on the fly).
So until the 80386 came out, there was no way to get a new system with both (a) support for old programs and (b) support for more address space. And during that 10-year dry spell, that's when all those extendad / expanded memory schemes came out, and that's when the 1 megabyte limit really hurt.
The RFC 822 protocol has an assumption in it that if someone wants to connect to my ISP's mail server and append some mail to my mailbox, that is always an okay thing.
It's not fair to place the onus of network authentication on one protocol, but RFC 822 is a very visible place where the problem occurred (spam).
More generally, a lot of Internet Protocols are written at a time when the community was small enough so that if someone misbehaved, it was not too hard to physically identify the perpetrator and cut off their network access. That assumption is no longer valid.
I've used a computer that had 900K of memory and ran MS-DOS just fine. All of it was conventional memory. No tricks.
The 640K limit comes from the following architectural limitations:
(1) Intel 8086 physical addresses are 20 bits long. (2) IBM partitioned the 1 megabyte address space into 640K of memory space, 384K of device space.
Other manufacturers made MS-DOS computers that were not PC register compatible. Some of them did allocate more of the 1024K address space to memory. MS-DOS works just fine up to the physical addressing limit of the 8086.
Back around 1981, I read a Byte article about the new IBM PC which said that it had a gigantic memory space. And they were right! Filling up that 640K would cost about $5000 at the price of memory back then. I think it's reaasonable for a personal computer to have enough address space to handle $5000 worth of memory (especially when $5000 in 1981 dollars is worth quite a bit more than $5000 in 2003 dollars).
Are you using a 64-bit desktop yet? Because if you're not, your 2003 desktop computer can't handle $5000 of memory!
I read Engines of Creation, got all fired up, went back to undergraduate school for a second undergraduate degree in chemistry, and really loved quantum mechanics. But organic chemistry opened up a serious can of kick-butt on me!
So I can read the debate but damned if I can make an intelligent contribution to it. Maybe I can translate it down a little:
Drexler: Yo, machine-phase chemistry is the bomb. We can put atoms wherever we want and make anything we want!
Smalley: No you can't, dork. Atoms are not little balls and bonds are *really* not little sticks. You can't build molecules like tinkertoys.
Drexler: Enzymes do it in nature, therefore it's possible.
Smalley: Well, if you wanna make more better enzymes, great, but enzymes only work in water-based living cells and it's kinda hard to grow a cell phone from organic components.
Drexler: My machine-phase chemistry will be to living enzymes as a metal airplane is to a bird.
Smalley: Whatever. Go do your "machine-phase chemistry" and come back when you've actually built something. Hint: I think it's gonna take you 200 years.
I think Smalley is wrong when he says that it's by nature impossible. And I think Drexler is wrong when he says nature has already provided an existence proof. I think we should get started on those 200 years of work and see what we can do!
Selling used books is "actual funding". It's actual money that the libraries actually use to buy new books and pay staff.
What's your real issue? Are you happy that libraries are getting more money? You don't sound like it. Or are you unhappy that they are getting more money in a way that offends your political conventions?
I can't read the article because it's slashdotted, so I have to go by the title. Sigh.
The FSF was founded about 20 years ago. Consider 10 or 20 software development organizations that were founded 20 years ago.
How many of them are top-tier or second-tier suppliers in their markets today?
How many of them even exist today?
The FSF, and the Open Source movement, have been much more effective at achieving their goals than DEC, Borland, Pyramid, Go, NeXT, and a whole lot of other organizations that you've never heard of.
I remember the days when just getting mentioned in the press was an achievement... when we counted the success stories one by one... when "using open source at work" meant that you could download the source for "grep" and build your $HOME/bin/grep, as long as you were quiet about it.
And now:
Apache with #1 market position?! Profitable public company based on GPL software?! Linux news sections in the mainstream tech media?! A legal showdown between a pissant company and IBM over open source software... and it's IBM on the open source side?!
The open source community has already succeeded several levels beyond anyone's wildest dreams of just ten years ago.
To think that they really care about what you do every second of every day is pretty narcissistic.
Straw man. It's not about me or you. It's about whether the FBI is wire-tapping Michael Moore or Matthew Drudge (to pick two guys with different political views who both like to publish stories that embarrass sitting presidents).
I like living in a country where ordinary people can grab their video camera or their HTML editor and publish news. I like living in a country where it's legal for anyone to organize a million people for a demonstration. You don't do these things, and I don't do these things, but we both benefit from the people who do.
When I fly, I've noticed that the pilot is always on the plane with me, but the engineers who wrote the auto-pilot software are NOT on the plane with me.
That's what I like about human pilots. Their interests are aligned with my interests.
How many orders of magnitude beyond the original damage do you want?
A very good question. I want 2 to 3 orders, roughly. I figure that about 1% of all crimes get brought to prosecution, and I want to make the average penalty higher than the cost of following the law.
As another poster said, the damage from spamming is usually more than 1 mail in 1 mailbox. If a spammer sends 1,000,000 messages, and they cause $0.01 of damage each (by assaulting other people's attention without permission), that's $10,000 in actual damage.
That's a serious crime.
But suppose I subscribe to some e-newsletter from Sony, and then I properly notify Sony that I don't want it any more, but they improperly keep sending it. How much damage am I suffering? $0.01 to $1, we agree. I'm willing to stipulate down close to $0.10. "2 to 3 orders of magnitude" means $10 to $100 for each offense, which seems reasonable to me if I have to actually take them to court.
Punishment should appropriately match the offense, that is all.
You know, this is why I like this discuession more than previous Slashdot discussions about spam laws. A lot of people are actually coming out and acknowledging that spammers are human beings; they have the same rights as other human beings; spamming is one crime among many; spamming should be treated in a coherent framework with other crimes.
Honestly, there were days on Slashdot when it seemd like people wanted to punish spammers more than they would punish Osama Bin Laden.
The penalty for violating a law should be much larger than the cost of following the law. Otherwise, people just break the law for free, and only pay if they get caught.
It's a separate argument whether a law is a good law in the first place. But if you believe, as I do, that spam should be illegal, then it's okay for the penalties to be a lot larger than actual damages.
For example, go down to the grocery store and shoplift some bread, and then try to get out of the criminal penalties by offering to pay the $2 damages after you get caught.
Linus already did this for the Linux kernel several years ago. Read the COPYING file at the top of the tree. Also note that the only valid version of the GPL as far as the kernel is concerned is _this_ particular version version of the license (ie v2, not v2.2 or v3.x or whatever), unless explicitly otherwise stated.
Re-frame the decision. Don't ask yourself "this dude on the phone wants $100 for CP, should I make an impulse contribution or not". The right decision tree is:
Decision 1: I have $XXX that I want to donate to make the world a better place.
Decision 2: I have decided that I am willing to donate $YYY of that to fight cerebral palsy and help people with the disease.
Decision 3: okay... what organization will spend the biggest percentage of my $YYY on programs that actually help people, and the least percentage on administration?
Making a charitable contribution actually has something in common with buying something else. There are large national reputable organizations; there are small local grassroots organizations; there are the asshats who call you on the phone unsolicited who work for some organization that you've never heard of.
I spent a few minutes looking for cerebral palsy associations in Canada and the first one I found, Cerebral Palsy Association of Canada, has a bunch of affiliates. I picked Ontario because I've been to Toronto once and it was cool. CP Ontario says that it spends about 11% of its revenue on administration, which leaves 89% for the good stuff.
Of course that figure may be gilded to look better than they actually are. Depending on how much you are donating and how sensitive you are, you can invest more time reading the annual reports and financial statements of the charities on your short list.
But when you look at the percentage that the people who make unsolicited calls turn over, some of those assholes keep 80% for "fundraising expenses" and give 20% to the ostensible beneficiaries.
So, the next time that you get one of those unsolicited calls, ask them for a copy of their annual report in the mail; ask them what percentage of their contributions go to administration and fund-raising; and ask them why you should donate to them instead of $MEGA_CHARITY or $LOCAL_HOSPITAL. Or, if keep taking the short route and tell them to fuck off, you can do it with a clean conscience -- you don't need those telemarketers to help you with your charitable contribution plan.
Slashdot Mirror
The very meaning of a privacy right is a restriction on the copying activity of people who have access to that information.
So do you think that a patient is damaged when a doctor gives copies of their medical records to a journalist, or not?
How do you reconcile that with your position that every person can make copies of any information that they possess and share those copies with other people?
That is: how come your position doesn't apply to your doctor?
You have no inherent right to restrict what other people copy.
Sure I do. I have a right to restrict what my doctor does with my medical records. I have the right to restrict what copies you make of the GPL software that I create.
These are legal rights (which you do not dispute), but I believe they have a foundation in moral rights (which obviously we disagree on).
And I'm just an American. I hear that Europeans have even more privacy rights. A privacy right, after all, is simply a restriction on what other people can copy.
Take a few minutes and think about how Billy Corgan or Jimmy Chamberlain or The Muffs or, uh, E would like the world to be.
Then take a few hours and spend them making the world more like that.
Then if you feel like it, write your hero a letter and tell them what you did. That part is optional.
Simple to say, hard to do.
You are right, I did miss that point. The customer pays sales tax on $350 and does not receive a sales tax credit on the $75 rebate.
.
... add standard argument about the effect of a change in the bar.)
The company does not care whether or not I more in taxes to the government
I think you are wrong about that -- the additional tax shfits the equilibrium point. I.e., in a 6% jurisdiction, the $350 gadget with a rebate has a total price of $296, but the $275 gadget as a total price of $291.50. Either way, the manufacturer plus the retailer receive $275. But they will sell a few less units at $296 than they will at $291.50. So they have to lower their price a bit and sell fewer units too.
(Insert standard supply-and-demand figure with government tax shown as a vertical bar
You are right, it does improve revenue (the top line). To get picky, it does not improve the balance sheet, not even temporarily if the accounting is honest (the liability for the rebate should accrue at the same time as the revenue from the sale).
And some people, like me, do look at the top-line revenue of a company to figure out whether it is really growing or not. Because a company can play lots of games to shuffle expenses around to manage their earnings, but it's harder to manage their revenue.
You are right about both #1 and #2. I did mention #2.
On the accounting side, let me put an accounting-geek green eyeshade on:
"Revenue" = total sales
"Expense" = raw materials, employee salaries, advertising, and so on
"Income" = "Revenue" - "Expense"
A person with a regular job has expenses of $0, so their income is the same as their revenue. That leads to confusion between "revenue" and "income". But a company almost always has expenses, and so do lots of people, so income revenue. Indeed it's possible for income 0, but it's not possible for revenue 0.
It doesn't improve their tax position.
If the company makes the item for $100, sells it for $350, and then pays out a $75 rebate, they have $175 of net income. They have to pay taxes on that.
If the company makes the item for $100 and sells it for $275 then they pay taxes on $175 of income.
To put it in your terms -- the company has to pay taxes on the "more revenue" they got through having a higher list price. You forgot about that part when you were thinking about the tax benefit of mailing the customer a check. The two things offset.
You are right about the personal information. Who's the best prospect for buying a new model of iPod? Someone who bought an iPod two years ago, of course!
Plus there is some percentage of people who buy the product but don't get the rebate. But nn the other hand, there are customers like you and me who say "ahhh, fuck it" on a $350 product with a $75 rebate, but we would just buy the damn thing for $275, so the rebate does lose them some sales compared to a simple flat price.
[I'm only about one or two Scientific American articles ahead of you, so let's hope that a real molecular biology geek shows up].
This is what antibodies are for. You need to make an antibody that has a very high specific affinity for the virus and a lower affinity for friendly cells. (Nature does this by generating large numbers of antibodies at random, then filtering out antibodies that show reactivity with your own cells. All the rest are let loose in the body).
Then you attach the magnetized tag on the other end of the antibody.
The antibody attaches to the virus in a death grip, and then the little black box can filter out the magnetized tag.
You don't have to remove 100% of the virus load to cure somebody. You just have to get a lot of the virus so that the body's natural immune system can fight the rest.
Indeed, other groups have tried the antibody idea with different payloads, such as a radioactive atom bonded onto the antibody. The antibody attaches to the virus or the cancer cell, then the radioactive atom decays right there next to the bad cell.
Many, many people behave in the future as they did in the past. About 70% to 80% of all the people who vote next time are going to vote the same way that they did last time.
Politicians know these trends and act accordingly.
Your whole argument looks profoundly stupid in light of the actions of the people who actually run, and win, elections. They pay a great deal of attention to redistricting.
What do you think of the Democratic state legislators in Texas who physically left the state in order to prevent the legislature from having a quorom? They think that redistricting is important. Do you think they are wildly misguided about the power of drawing the district lines?
It has gone the other way in the past. In 1960, the Democratic margin of victory in Illinois was smaller than the amount of vote fraud that went on in Chicago. Nixon chose to concede the election rather than put the country through a constitutional crisis -- perhaps the only decent thing he ever did in his public career.
You're right, though. The New York Times sponsored a post-election recount of the paper ballots (yay paper ballots). Theie study came out with the result that the NY Times didn't want to see, so they barely mentioned that their study had finished, and that, according to their count, Bush got more votes.
A pox on both their houses.
How many software engineers does it take to change a lightbulb?
Just one. But it takes them all night. And when they're done, the washing machine doesn't work right.
A "server" in 1981 would be something like a PDP-11 or Vax on the low end. Such machines were more expensive than desktop computers, and had larger physical address spaces. Even a modest PDP-11/70 had 22 address bits.
Most people preferred to spend $2000 on a PC with a 16-bit address space rather than $10000 on a PDP-11 with a 22-bit address space.
I think that 20 address bits were plenty for 1981. The real problem was that there was no upgrade path for about 10 years after that. The Intel 8086 was 20 bits, fine. The Intel 80186 was 20 bits, okay. The Intel 80286 had "protected mode" addressing to increase the addres space, but it was nearly impossible for an operating system to context switch between "protected mode" and "real mode" (there was no instruction to do it, so an OS had to actually REBOOT THE PROCESSOR and then recover all its state on the fly).
So until the 80386 came out, there was no way to get a new system with both (a) support for old programs and (b) support for more address space. And during that 10-year dry spell, that's when all those extendad / expanded memory schemes came out, and that's when the 1 megabyte limit really hurt.
The RFC 822 protocol has an assumption in it that if someone wants to connect to my ISP's mail server and append some mail to my mailbox, that is always an okay thing.
It's not fair to place the onus of network authentication on one protocol, but RFC 822 is a very visible place where the problem occurred (spam).
More generally, a lot of Internet Protocols are written at a time when the community was small enough so that if someone misbehaved, it was not too hard to physically identify the perpetrator and cut off their network access. That assumption is no longer valid.
MS-DOS does not have a 640K memory limit.
I've used a computer that had 900K of memory and ran MS-DOS just fine. All of it was conventional memory. No tricks.
The 640K limit comes from the following architectural limitations:
(1) Intel 8086 physical addresses are 20 bits long.
(2) IBM partitioned the 1 megabyte address space into 640K of memory space, 384K of device space.
Other manufacturers made MS-DOS computers that were not PC register compatible. Some of them did allocate more of the 1024K address space to memory. MS-DOS works just fine up to the physical addressing limit of the 8086.
Back around 1981, I read a Byte article about the new IBM PC which said that it had a gigantic memory space. And they were right! Filling up that 640K would cost about $5000 at the price of memory back then. I think it's reaasonable for a personal computer to have enough address space to handle $5000 worth of memory (especially when $5000 in 1981 dollars is worth quite a bit more than $5000 in 2003 dollars).
Are you using a 64-bit desktop yet? Because if you're not, your 2003 desktop computer can't handle $5000 of memory!
I read Engines of Creation, got all fired up, went back to undergraduate school for a second undergraduate degree in chemistry, and really loved quantum mechanics. But organic chemistry opened up a serious can of kick-butt on me!
So I can read the debate but damned if I can make an intelligent contribution to it. Maybe I can translate it down a little:
Drexler: Yo, machine-phase chemistry is the bomb. We can put atoms wherever we want and make anything we want!
Smalley: No you can't, dork. Atoms are not little balls and bonds are *really* not little sticks. You can't build molecules like tinkertoys.
Drexler: Enzymes do it in nature, therefore it's possible.
Smalley: Well, if you wanna make more better enzymes, great, but enzymes only work in water-based living cells and it's kinda hard to grow a cell phone from organic components.
Drexler: My machine-phase chemistry will be to living enzymes as a metal airplane is to a bird.
Smalley: Whatever. Go do your "machine-phase chemistry" and come back when you've actually built something. Hint: I think it's gonna take you 200 years.
I think Smalley is wrong when he says that it's by nature impossible. And I think Drexler is wrong when he says nature has already provided an existence proof. I think we should get started on those 200 years of work and see what we can do!
Selling used books is "actual funding". It's actual money that the libraries actually use to buy new books and pay staff.
What's your real issue? Are you happy that libraries are getting more money? You don't sound like it. Or are you unhappy that they are getting more money in a way that offends your political conventions?
I can't read the article because it's slashdotted, so I have to go by the title. Sigh.
... when we counted the success stories one by one ... when "using open source at work" meant that you could download the source for "grep" and build your $HOME/bin/grep, as long as you were quiet about it.
... and it's IBM on the open source side?!
The FSF was founded about 20 years ago. Consider 10 or 20 software development organizations that were founded 20 years ago.
How many of them are top-tier or second-tier suppliers in their markets today?
How many of them even exist today?
The FSF, and the Open Source movement, have been much more effective at achieving their goals than DEC, Borland, Pyramid, Go, NeXT, and a whole lot of other organizations that you've never heard of.
I remember the days when just getting mentioned in the press was an achievement
And now:
Apache with #1 market position?!
Profitable public company based on GPL software?!
Linux news sections in the mainstream tech media?!
A legal showdown between a pissant company and IBM over open source software
The open source community has already succeeded several levels beyond anyone's wildest dreams of just ten years ago.
Right, here's a link.
To think that they really care about what you do every second of every day is pretty narcissistic.
Straw man. It's not about me or you. It's about whether the FBI is wire-tapping Michael Moore or Matthew Drudge (to pick two guys with different political views who both like to publish stories that embarrass sitting presidents).
I like living in a country where ordinary people can grab their video camera or their HTML editor and publish news. I like living in a country where it's legal for anyone to organize a million people for a demonstration. You don't do these things, and I don't do these things, but we both benefit from the people who do.
The Matux Has You
Actually, that's more like a "Morpheux" than a "Matux". Whatever. Click and giggle.
When I fly, I've noticed that the pilot is always on the plane with me, but the engineers who wrote the auto-pilot software are NOT on the plane with me.
That's what I like about human pilots. Their interests are aligned with my interests.
How many orders of magnitude beyond the original damage do you want?
A very good question. I want 2 to 3 orders, roughly. I figure that about 1% of all crimes get brought to prosecution, and I want to make the average penalty higher than the cost of following the law.
As another poster said, the damage from spamming is usually more than 1 mail in 1 mailbox. If a spammer sends 1,000,000 messages, and they cause $0.01 of damage each (by assaulting other people's attention without permission), that's $10,000 in actual damage.
That's a serious crime.
But suppose I subscribe to some e-newsletter from Sony, and then I properly notify Sony that I don't want it any more, but they improperly keep sending it. How much damage am I suffering? $0.01 to $1, we agree. I'm willing to stipulate down close to $0.10. "2 to 3 orders of magnitude" means $10 to $100 for each offense, which seems reasonable to me if I have to actually take them to court.
Punishment should appropriately match the offense, that is all.
You know, this is why I like this discuession more than previous Slashdot discussions about spam laws. A lot of people are actually coming out and acknowledging that spammers are human beings; they have the same rights as other human beings; spamming is one crime among many; spamming should be treated in a coherent framework with other crimes.
Honestly, there were days on Slashdot when it seemd like people wanted to punish spammers more than they would punish Osama Bin Laden.
The penalty for violating a law should be much larger than the cost of following the law. Otherwise, people just break the law for free, and only pay if they get caught.
It's a separate argument whether a law is a good law in the first place. But if you believe, as I do, that spam should be illegal, then it's okay for the penalties to be a lot larger than actual damages.
For example, go down to the grocery store and shoplift some bread, and then try to get out of the criminal penalties by offering to pay the $2 damages after you get caught.
Linus already did this for the Linux kernel several years ago. Read the COPYING file at the top of the tree.
Also note that the only valid version of the GPL as far as the kernel is concerned is _this_ particular version version of the license (ie v2, not v2.2 or v3.x or whatever), unless explicitly otherwise stated.
Re-frame the decision. Don't ask yourself "this dude on the phone wants $100 for CP, should I make an impulse contribution or not". The right decision tree is:
... what organization will spend the biggest percentage of my $YYY on programs that actually help people, and the least percentage on administration?
Decision 1: I have $XXX that I want to donate to make the world a better place.
Decision 2: I have decided that I am willing to donate $YYY of that to fight cerebral palsy and help people with the disease.
Decision 3: okay
Making a charitable contribution actually has something in common with buying something else. There are large national reputable organizations; there are small local grassroots organizations; there are the asshats who call you on the phone unsolicited who work for some organization that you've never heard of.
I spent a few minutes looking for cerebral palsy associations in Canada and the first one I found, Cerebral Palsy Association of Canada, has a bunch of affiliates. I picked Ontario because I've been to Toronto once and it was cool. CP Ontario says that it spends about 11% of its revenue on administration, which leaves 89% for the good stuff.
Of course that figure may be gilded to look better than they actually are. Depending on how much you are donating and how sensitive you are, you can invest more time reading the annual reports and financial statements of the charities on your short list.
But when you look at the percentage that the people who make unsolicited calls turn over, some of those assholes keep 80% for "fundraising expenses" and give 20% to the ostensible beneficiaries.
So, the next time that you get one of those unsolicited calls, ask them for a copy of their annual report in the mail; ask them what percentage of their contributions go to administration and fund-raising; and ask them why you should donate to them instead of $MEGA_CHARITY or $LOCAL_HOSPITAL. Or, if keep taking the short route and tell them to fuck off, you can do it with a clean conscience -- you don't need those telemarketers to help you with your charitable contribution plan.