The mudder's use is not recorded, of course, as far as I have found. Simply reports from mudders say that when people started flooding a mud with text, and later objects, somebody called it spamming. From the Monty Python, because the vikings keep repeating the word over and over and over again.
I have conflicting stories on the first use, but without logs we may never know.
The Green Card Lawyer spam was indeed was caused the term to really take off, but it was in use before their posting. People pay attention to Canter & Siegel (instead of giving them the footnote of obscurity they deserve) because they had such bravado about it. Other early massive posters, including jj@portal.com and the Jesus is coming poster had turned tail and run when they faced criticism. C&S met it head on, and that got people really angry.
And thus the term really grew. But theirs was not the first spam, not the first to be called a spam, not even the first big spam. It was the first for a new level of anger.
No, Dilbert was already doing quite well when I picked it up, though it had not reached today's astronomical success and become an Industry unto itself yet. Scott was still living in the Bay Area, and still working for Pac Bell at the time.
One thing I did observe about Dilbert to Scott was that part of its appeal was that it was one of the few comics to make fun of not just high-tech but modern office life. There are other office comics -- Cathy, Sally Forth, even Blondie, but none attack the office the way Dilbert does. His best work seemed to come with Dilbert at work rather than Dilber at home.
Now I doubt it was because of my comment, but after that I noticed he started doing more stuff at the office, which was not necessarily a good thing since you needed some balance. But he did become a mega-industry so who can complain?
And sure, one can be proud of starting the first dot-com, by which I mean a company created to use the internet as a platform for business, which ClariNet was the first at. (UUNET was earlier but its business was to deliver you connectivity, rather than use the connectivity.)
Back then it was something new and exciting. Other people gave dotcom companies a bad name, wasting venture money (which I never took) and creating an illusion.
Not so much a dup as a mis-timing. I had been preparing an article about the 25th anniversary for my site and slashdot for a while as we came up to the date. The article was ready and somebody else wrote an article with some of that history, based in part on mine, which was already on the web, and it was put up not knowing my article was getting ready for release. However, there is enough new stuff in my history to have justified putting 'em both up.
While commercial skipping is far from the whole picture on a PVR, it alone can cause you to justify buying one of these things today, rather than waiting for any improvement in it.
Consider if you watch 1 hour of TV per day that you don't watch on videotape, which is quite low for the average viewer.
That means about 20 minutes saved per day. Or 10 hours a month. If you watch more TV, multiply it out.
How much do you value your time? You should value it as much as others will pay for it. Are you a $50/hour consultant? That's $500/month, enough to pay for itself in ONE MONTH. Are you a $6/hour burger flipper? Still a $47/month gain (after monthly fee.) and enough to pay for it in just a few months.
You are absolutely crazy to wait, and the commercial skipping is just one of the features you will want. Every month you don't buy it you are wasting money.
Of course you can videotape everything, and watch it at lower quality with incvonenience. But most don't. But with the Tivo you record everything, you almost never watch live. So it really makes this difference.
There is one caveat. When you first get it, you will watch more TV for a while. If you have discipline, you will bring it back down over time.
Well, before those programs, I was lucky enough to be Personal Software's first employee and consult on VisiCalc. Just a teen-ager but the world was already getting exciting.
This thread is no doubt inspired by the panel last night at the computer history museum on the legacy of Visicalc. It was a great time, and a lot of those of us who had worked on Visicalc's development and marketing came out, some I had not seen for 20 years.
Charles Simonyi, onetime competitor to VisiCalc, was the moderator, but he made a remarkable claim about its role in history.
What he starts with is true. Visicalc was the first app that caused people to buy personal computers in numbers, and in particular for business people to do so. In the past, people wanted an Apple ][ or a Pet. This changed, so that they wanted VisiCalc, and an Apple was the way to get something to run it on.
As such, VisiCalc sparked the PC industry, which begat, well, all of this. Quite a juncture in history.
Of course, something else would have come along, PCs are just too useful for this not to happen, but the course of it was definitely set and changed by Dan Bricklin, Bob Frankston and Dan Fylstra -- and Mitch Kapor, who was product manager for VisiCalc before he went to found Lotus and eventually defeat VisiCalc in the market.
The meseum at computerhistory.org will probably put up the video of the panel before too long, so you can check it out.
The older among you will remember Archie, the internet's first search engine, out of McGill, which indexed all known FTP servers and let you search for files.
Wake is effectively identical.
Archie was the grandfather of the web. One would hope a court would not declare it retroactively to have been illegal.
I get lots of machine recorded calls which are outright banned. And I have sued and won money over they. But in the end almost nobody does and it's not worth doing and not effective. The national do not call list is much more effective and should start up pretty soon.
However, at least with faxes and junk calls they are usually domestic. Spam is much more international, unfortunately, putting it outside the realm of law for any blanket solution.
And I do tell everybody to put me on the do not call list and I still get many calls, so you are lucky. I even joined private citizen for their DNC book they send to major telecmarketers etc.
It just aint going to work, and the constitutionality is questionable. (Ie. it gets a lot of debate, I realize that some people think it's constitutional, some don't, but the point is not the answer to that question but the fact that there is undeniably a debatable question.) This wastes time, risks nasty consequences, etc. There are much better techniques that use combinations of technology and simpler (uncontroversial) applications of the law, and these techniques are showing to be effective even in primative versions. Why waste time calling in the government to regulate e-mail in such a case?
Yes, I said that, so what precisely are you trying to say? Everybody knows the nastiness spam causes, the point remains that single e-mails are at least an order or three in magnitude less expensive than faxes to receive, or send. Nobody thinks spam is not a problem to be solved, however the same legal tools are simply not available.
Not that this matters a lot. The legal tools against junk phone calls and fax have not worked, nor have any of the approximately 25 state spam laws. Fighting hard for laws of questionable constitutionality seems silly to me, but when the laws are demonstrably not going to actually do anything about the problem it seems quixotic. Is it just to make people feel good, to satisfy their feelign that there ought to be a law?
A lot of spam can load a server and cost money, but unfortunately no single E-mail has a cost that is worthy of notice, at least in the USA. With fax you can point to a fax and say, "This fax cost me 2 cents to print, and while it was coming in, my fax line was blocked for 2 minutes."
Unfortunately you can't do that with an e-mail. You can only say, "the ISP got a million spams and they finally had to buy more bandwidth."
Which can't be used to make a law that bans single spams the way the junk fax law bans single junk faxes.
Not that it works, of course. I have done lawsuits under the TCPA, the law that includes the junk fax provision. It is not productive. I have won money, but it takes more of your time per victory than it is worth.
Galling as it is, spam is not in the same class as fax so I would not expect much from this case into the world of spam. Remember, the courts are, quite rightly, loathe to put restrictions on communications. Here they said a fax costs enough to allow the government to do it. Spam costs are orders of magnitude lower, especially for any single spam. Unlike spam, a single fax can tie up your machine and make you miss a wanted fax, while for spam, only the overwhelming volume, not any one message, can be in rare cases responsible for filling a mailbox to the point it can't get mail.
The courts have mused over this issue a bit. The first rulings on the junk fax law were done when fax paper cost quite a chunk per fax, and people wondered as the cost came down if the cost-transfer test would still apply. The courts seem pretty clear that they don't think really miniscule cost tranfers would qualify as a compelling government interest, it's a question of amount here, not kind.
The principle of not punishing the innocent to get at the guilty is not modified with waivers like, "unless the guilty are really guilty" or "unless doing so would be really effective against the guilty."
(I'm commenting not just on the post above but on many of the replies to this thread.)
And it's also not modified by "I will find some reason to rationalize to myself that they are not really innocent, because they should have known better than to patronize the bad ISP or associate with the wrong fellow users."
If you found your internet connection cut off because other people on your ISP misbehaved, I think most people would be royally pissed.
We have stood up proudly saying "Don't blame the ISP if the users are posting porn" or "Don't blame the ISP if the user is running a kazaa client." Most people here have fought hard against the CDA, DMCA takedown orders, the Verio shutdown of Thing, the German and French attempts to threaten sites like eBay and Yahoo because of bad things their users are doing, to force those companies to block or stop those users.
But when it comes to something we don't like, such as spammers, we are ready to blame and punish the ISP and all the ISP's innocent users.
I'm sorry, but this is a terrible hypocracy. And what I don't get is why spam makes people so emotional that they would participate in this hyporcacy.
Do you believe in an end to end network where you don't punish the midpoints for the data sent by the endpoints? Or don't you?
How can slashdot have proud trumpeting of Doc Searls' new essay on how the internet is all about end to end on the same page with "delete messages from users at ISPs that don't deal with spammers as we want."
Now this is a day old/. thread so I doubt anybody is reading this any more, so I won't post further, but I think people need to look at this hyprocracy.
Really, so if you participated in a thread that week on the net, posted a number of messages you put a bit of thought into and spent some time on (OK, it's USENET, but bear with me) and you discovered at the end of the week that the reason nobody resopnded to your messages was not that they were boring, but because they were autocancelled because you had picked an ISP that had some users other people don't like -- you would not feel anything had been done to you, that it was all your own fault for not picking another ISP?
So the users of this ISP are people who are knowingly supporting spammers?
Look this "don't punish the innocent to get at the guilty" isn't something I just made up. It's a fundamental principle of justice, leaarned over centuries. It applies even to murder. It doesn't have an "except to stop spam" rider on it.
These people will have their postings blocked and they know nothing of what's going on. They will not get error messages saying their posting was deleted, will they?
It amazes me how much emotion spam brings out. I hate it as much as anybody, but that's not enough to violate fundamental principles, including the one that it's not moral to punish the innocent to get at the guilty, particularly when you deliberately punish the innocent because by association, they can be forced to put pressure on the guilty or those who can punish the guilty.
It's like starving out a country to depose a dictator. Whoops.:-(
It's just not something you do, and spam, while a royal pain in the ass, doesn't cut it. I wouldn't punish the innocent to get Usama bin Ladin, let alone spammers.
If you want a real benefit for the subscribers, even if they wait until after the story goes live, how about cacheing the main pages of sites that are linked to that don't have high capacity, and that haven't asked not to be cached.
If google can get away with it, you can do the same. Just be rigourous about turning off the cacheing if a site wants it off (give an automatic way to do that, such as them inserting a meta tag in their page which you check every 10 minutes).
And offer a way for them to access the logs on the cache, so that they can see how many hits they got. (Alternately do a HEAD only hit on their server for every hit on the cache, which they can probably handle.)
Of course you must include their ads (uncached as they get paid only for real ad fetches) and you can have a list of high performance sites (NYT, major news sites) which don't get cached.
Alas, not -- most TCPA cases attempt to sue where the plaintiff is, defining the offense as having taken place at the recipients phone or fax. And you can sue somebody from the other end of the state, and haul him into court. For example, you can in theory if you live in Eureka, CA sue a junk faxer in San Diego and haul him into court in Eureka. Even though it would cost him much more than the $500 penalty to come up there.
And that is, alas, not fair, as anybody can see if they put on the hat of an innocent defendant against a false accusation.
And the other truth is that nobody is going to travel out of state (unless they live on a state border) to sue a spammer or junk faxer for $500. Even if you think you might get your travel costs as part of the damages -- and don't be too sure of that, as the odds are excellent that you will not get them -- the risk and cost in time aren't worth it. A long trip like that is more than a day of your time, on top of other time spent. Again, for every success, you would need a $5K reward, not a $500 reward to make it worth the trip.
Some will say the TCPA applies to fax, some will not. Most will not -- most don't even know much about it, let alone have a willingless to stretch it to define an E-mail as a Fax.
Sadly the TCPA is fairly toothless. Yes, you can sue for $500 and you might win. I have done so myself, and collected. But after spending several hours of work, and the average amount of time spent per successful collection is normally high enough that it's not worth your trouble.
Some small claims judges think you can't sue somebody out of state, some thing you can. Even on spam laws where there isn't the TCPA question.
There is a valid question of whether you should be able to sue somebody out of state in small claims court for $500. Think about it -- it costs $500 at least to come and defend yourself in an out of state case, so how can you win, even if you are totally innocent?
How would you feel if you -- not a junk faxer at all -- got a summons to appear in court on the other side of the country to face a $500 payment for junk faxing? You could go and defend yourself, but it would cost you way more than $500 in costs, don't even talk about your time. You can't send a lawyer, if somehow that would save money.
So it's tough to figure out how to allow this. And spammers and junk faxers are rarely local, though sometimes they are.
What if you took the risk that if you sued an out of state spammer, you would have to pay his expenses to come out if you lost, or take them out of your winnings if you won? I would not.
Even as much as we hate spam, the idea that states should be allowed to regulate E-mail is really frightening. On most of my E-mails, I have no idea what state (or nation) the recipient is in.
If state regulation of E-mail is upheld, it means every time you send an E-mail you must figure out what state it is going to, learn the laws of that state, and then obey them. Sounds fine if it's an anti-spam law, but the principle would apply to any regulation the state might dream up. You would get 50 different sents of rules about what emails were legal and which were not. For example, New Mexico tried to pass a law regulating decency in internet traffic to New Mexico. No thanks to granting states that sort of authority.
If you want an opt-out list, it's got to be global or at least federal. Global's hard to do. Unfortunately, unlike phone numbers, I have an infinite number of E-mail addresses so an opt-out list is not so practical. If you allowed patterns you could cover it but you would need a way to authenticate the ownership of the pattern.
You also don't want the list published in cleartext, though it's hard to avoid this. While you could publish a list of hashes of excluded e-mail addresses, it's not hard to extract a lot of the addresses since the real ones come from a finite space. After all spammers have managed to harvest well enough.
That study derives a lot of the figure to damage to New York City, based on jobs and commerce departing the city, and the overall economic slowdown. At least in the case of jobs leaving NYC, that's just a move from one place to another, and not a net negative on the larger scale.
However, I mean the actual damage to the property. The real estate values of the destroyed buildings and the loss from the temporary closures.
Clearly the WTC was a worse disaster because of the people killed, and the fact it was deliberate, and the social, moral and political blows associated with it. I am just pointing out that these shuttles are so expensive they cost more than the real estate in the downtowns of all but the largest cities.
People have died, but the issue is not just the risk to life, but the bang for buck. People don't seem to be realizing this, but based on a number of estimates of the overall cost of the shuttle program and each shuttle (starting at 500M per launch) The destruction of the Columbia was considerably more expensive than the destruction of the World Trade Center.
It's a boondoggle path into space, getting in the way of cheaper, safer, more reliable systems from low-pork teams or private industry.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm a unix geek like the rest of you.
The mudder's use is not recorded, of course, as far as I have found. Simply reports from mudders say that when people started flooding a mud with text, and later objects, somebody called it spamming. From the Monty Python, because the vikings keep repeating the word over and over and over again.
I have conflicting stories on the first use, but without logs we may never know.
The Green Card Lawyer spam was indeed was caused the term to really take off, but it was in use before their posting. People pay attention to Canter & Siegel (instead of giving them the footnote of obscurity they deserve) because they had such bravado about it. Other early massive posters, including jj@portal.com and the Jesus is coming poster had turned tail and run when they faced criticism. C&S met it head on, and that got people really angry.
And thus the term really grew. But theirs was not the first spam, not the first to be called a spam, not even the first big spam. It was the first for a new level of anger.
No, Dilbert was already doing quite well when I picked it up, though it had not reached today's astronomical success and become an Industry unto itself yet. Scott was still living in the Bay Area, and still working for Pac Bell at the time.
One thing I did observe about Dilbert to Scott was that part of its appeal was that it was one of the few comics to make fun of not just high-tech but modern office life. There are other office comics -- Cathy, Sally Forth, even Blondie, but none attack the office the way Dilbert does. His best work seemed to come with Dilbert at work rather than Dilber at home.
Now I doubt it was because of my comment, but after that I noticed he started doing more stuff at the office, which was not necessarily a good thing since you needed some balance. But he did become a mega-industry so who can complain?
And sure, one can be proud of starting the first dot-com, by which I mean a company created to use the internet as a platform for business, which ClariNet was the first at. (UUNET was earlier but its business was to deliver you connectivity, rather than use the connectivity.)
Back then it was something new and exciting. Other people gave dotcom companies a bad name, wasting venture money (which I never took) and creating an illusion.
Not so much a dup as a mis-timing. I had been preparing an article about the 25th anniversary for my site and slashdot for a while as we came up to the date. The article was ready and somebody else wrote an article with some of that history, based in part on mine, which was already on the web, and it was put up not knowing my article was getting ready for release. However, there is enough new stuff in my history to have justified putting 'em both up.
While commercial skipping is far from the whole picture on a PVR, it alone can cause you to justify buying one of these things today, rather than waiting for any improvement in it.
Consider if you watch 1 hour of TV per day that you don't watch on videotape, which is quite low for the average viewer.
That means about 20 minutes saved per day. Or 10 hours a month. If you watch more TV, multiply it out.
How much do you value your time? You should value it as much as others will pay for it. Are you a $50/hour consultant? That's $500/month, enough to pay for itself in ONE MONTH. Are you a $6/hour burger flipper? Still a $47/month gain (after monthly fee.) and enough to pay for it in just a few months.
You are absolutely crazy to wait, and the commercial skipping is just one of the features you will want. Every month you don't buy it you are wasting money.
Of course you can videotape everything, and watch it at lower quality with incvonenience. But most don't. But with the Tivo you record everything, you almost never watch live. So it really makes this difference.
There is one caveat. When you first get it, you will watch more TV for a while. If you have discipline, you will bring it back down over time.
Well, before those programs, I was lucky enough to be Personal Software's first employee and consult on VisiCalc. Just a teen-ager but the world was already getting exciting.
This thread is no doubt inspired by the panel last night at the computer history museum on the legacy of Visicalc. It was a great time, and a lot of those of us who had worked on Visicalc's development and marketing came out, some I had not seen for 20 years.
Charles Simonyi, onetime competitor to VisiCalc, was the moderator, but he made a remarkable claim about its role in history.
What he starts with is true. Visicalc was the first app that caused people to buy personal computers in numbers, and in particular for business people to do so. In the past, people wanted an Apple ][ or a Pet. This changed, so that they wanted VisiCalc, and an Apple was the way to get something to run it on.
As such, VisiCalc sparked the PC industry, which begat, well, all of this. Quite a juncture in history.
Of course, something else would have come along, PCs are just too useful for this not to happen, but the course of it was definitely set and changed by Dan Bricklin, Bob Frankston and Dan Fylstra -- and Mitch Kapor, who was product manager for VisiCalc before he went to found Lotus and eventually defeat VisiCalc in the market.
The meseum at computerhistory.org will probably put up the video of the panel before too long, so you can check it out.
I think you missed the point. However, this is a day old /. thread.
The older among you will remember Archie, the internet's first search engine, out of McGill, which indexed all known FTP servers and let you search for files.
Wake is effectively identical.
Archie was the grandfather of the web. One would hope a court would not declare it retroactively to have been illegal.
I get lots of machine recorded calls which are outright banned. And I have sued and won money over they. But in the end almost nobody does and it's not worth doing and not effective. The national do not call list is much more effective and should start up pretty soon.
However, at least with faxes and junk calls they are usually domestic. Spam is much more international, unfortunately, putting it outside the realm of law for any blanket solution.
And I do tell everybody to put me on the do not call list and I still get many calls, so you are lucky. I even joined private citizen for their DNC book they send to major telecmarketers etc.
It just aint going to work, and the constitutionality is questionable. (Ie. it gets a lot of debate, I realize that some people think it's constitutional, some don't, but the point is not the answer to that question but the fact that there is undeniably a debatable question.) This wastes time, risks nasty consequences, etc. There are much better techniques that use combinations of technology and simpler (uncontroversial) applications of the law, and these techniques are showing to be effective even in primative versions. Why waste time calling in the government to regulate e-mail in such a case?
Yes, I said that, so what precisely are you trying to say? Everybody knows the nastiness spam causes, the point remains that single e-mails are at least an order or three in magnitude less expensive than faxes to receive, or send. Nobody thinks spam is not a problem to be solved, however the same legal tools are simply not available.
Not that this matters a lot. The legal tools against junk phone calls and fax have not worked, nor have any of the approximately 25 state spam laws. Fighting hard for laws of questionable constitutionality seems silly to me, but when the laws are demonstrably not going to actually do anything about the problem it seems quixotic. Is it just to make people feel good, to satisfy their feelign that there ought to be a law?
A lot of spam can load a server and cost money, but unfortunately no single E-mail has a cost that is worthy of notice, at least in the USA. With fax you can point to a fax and say, "This fax cost me 2 cents to print, and while it was coming in, my fax line was blocked for 2 minutes."
Unfortunately you can't do that with an e-mail. You can only say, "the ISP got a million spams and they finally had to buy more bandwidth."
Which can't be used to make a law that bans single spams the way the junk fax law bans single junk faxes.
Not that it works, of course. I have done lawsuits under the TCPA, the law that includes the junk fax provision. It is not productive. I have won money, but it takes more of your time per victory than it is worth.
Galling as it is, spam is not in the same class as fax so I would not expect much from this case into the world of spam. Remember, the courts are, quite rightly, loathe to put restrictions on communications. Here they said a fax costs enough to allow the government to do it. Spam costs are orders of magnitude lower, especially for any single spam. Unlike spam, a single fax can tie up your machine and make you miss a wanted fax, while for spam, only the overwhelming volume, not any one message, can be in rare cases responsible for filling a mailbox to the point it can't get mail.
The courts have mused over this issue a bit. The first rulings on the junk fax law were done when fax paper cost quite a chunk per fax, and people wondered as the cost came down if the cost-transfer test would still apply. The courts seem pretty clear that they don't think really miniscule cost tranfers would qualify as a compelling government interest, it's a question of amount here, not kind.
The principle of not punishing the innocent to get at the guilty is not modified with waivers like, "unless the guilty are really guilty" or "unless doing so would be really effective against the guilty."
/. thread so I doubt anybody is reading this any more, so I won't post further, but I think people need to look at this hyprocracy.
(I'm commenting not just on the post above but on many of the replies to this thread.)
And it's also not modified by "I will find some reason to rationalize to myself that they are not really innocent, because they should have known better than to patronize the bad ISP or associate with the wrong fellow users."
If you found your internet connection cut off because other people on your ISP misbehaved, I think most people would be royally pissed.
We have stood up proudly saying "Don't blame the ISP if the users are posting porn" or "Don't blame the ISP if the user is running a kazaa client." Most people here have fought hard against the CDA, DMCA takedown orders, the Verio shutdown of Thing, the German and French attempts to threaten sites like eBay and Yahoo because of bad things their users are doing, to force those companies to block or stop those users.
But when it comes to something we don't like, such as spammers, we are ready to blame and punish the ISP and all the ISP's innocent users.
I'm sorry, but this is a terrible hypocracy. And what I don't get is why spam makes people so emotional that they would participate in this hyporcacy.
Do you believe in an end to end network where you don't punish the midpoints for the data sent by the endpoints? Or don't you?
How can slashdot have proud trumpeting of Doc Searls' new essay on how the internet is all about end to end on the same page with "delete messages from users at ISPs that don't deal with spammers as we want."
Now this is a day old
Really, so if you participated in a thread that week on the net, posted a number of messages you put a bit of thought into and spent some time on (OK, it's USENET, but bear with me) and you discovered at the end of the week that the reason nobody resopnded to your messages was not that they were boring, but because they were autocancelled because you had picked an ISP that had some users other people don't like -- you would not feel anything had been done to you, that it was all your own fault for not picking another ISP?
So the users of this ISP are people who are knowingly supporting spammers?
Look this "don't punish the innocent to get at the guilty" isn't something I just made up. It's a fundamental principle of justice, leaarned over centuries. It applies even to murder. It doesn't have an "except to stop spam" rider on it.
These people will have their postings blocked and they know nothing of what's going on. They will not get error messages saying their posting was deleted, will they?
It amazes me how much emotion spam brings out. I hate it as much as anybody, but that's not enough to violate fundamental principles, including the one that it's not moral to punish the innocent to get at the guilty, particularly when you deliberately punish the innocent because by association, they can be forced to put pressure on the guilty or those who can punish the guilty.
:-(
It's like starving out a country to depose a dictator. Whoops.
It's just not something you do, and spam, while a royal pain in the ass, doesn't cut it. I wouldn't punish the innocent to get Usama bin Ladin, let alone spammers.
If you want a real benefit for the subscribers, even if they wait until after the story goes live, how about cacheing the main pages of sites that are linked to that don't have high capacity, and that haven't asked not to be cached.
If google can get away with it, you can do the same. Just be rigourous about turning off the cacheing if a site wants it off (give an automatic way to do that, such as them inserting a meta tag in their page which you check every 10 minutes).
And offer a way for them to access the logs on the cache, so that they can see how many hits they got. (Alternately do a HEAD only hit on their server for every hit on the cache, which they can probably handle.)
Of course you must include their ads (uncached as they get paid only for real ad fetches) and you can have a list of high performance sites (NYT, major news sites) which don't get cached.
Alas, not -- most TCPA cases attempt to sue where the plaintiff is, defining the offense as having taken place at the recipients phone or fax. And you can sue somebody from the other end of the state, and haul him into court. For example, you can in theory if you live in Eureka, CA sue a junk faxer in San Diego and haul him into court in Eureka. Even though it would cost him much more than the $500 penalty to come up there.
And that is, alas, not fair, as anybody can see if they put on the hat of an innocent defendant against a false accusation.
And the other truth is that nobody is going to travel out of state (unless they live on a state border) to sue a spammer or junk faxer for $500. Even if you think you might get your travel costs as part of the damages -- and don't be too sure of that, as the odds are excellent that you will not get them -- the risk and cost in time aren't worth it. A long trip like that is more than a day of your time, on top of other time spent. Again, for every success, you would need a $5K reward, not a $500 reward to make it worth the trip.
Some will say the TCPA applies to fax, some will not. Most will not -- most don't even know much about it, let alone have a willingless to stretch it to define an E-mail as a Fax.
Sadly the TCPA is fairly toothless. Yes, you can sue for $500 and you might win. I have done so myself, and collected. But after spending several hours of work, and the average amount of time spent per successful collection is normally high enough that it's not worth your trouble.
Some small claims judges think you can't sue somebody out of state, some thing you can. Even on spam laws where there isn't the TCPA question.
There is a valid question of whether you should be able to sue somebody out of state in small claims court for $500. Think about it -- it costs $500 at least to come and defend yourself in an out of state case, so how can you win, even if you are totally innocent?
How would you feel if you -- not a junk faxer at all -- got a summons to appear in court on the other side of the country to face a $500 payment for junk faxing? You could go and defend yourself, but it would cost you way more than $500 in costs, don't even talk about your time. You can't send a lawyer, if somehow that would save money.
So it's tough to figure out how to allow this. And spammers and junk faxers are rarely local, though sometimes they are.
What if you took the risk that if you sued an out of state spammer, you would have to pay his expenses to come out if you lost, or take them out of your winnings if you won? I would not.
And I think "Hans Blix and the U.N. Inspectors" would be a really, really great name for a rock band.
But I changed my mind.
Wrote an addendum to my earlier essay on it with the reasons why which can be found at my spam essay site
Even as much as we hate spam, the idea that states should be allowed to regulate E-mail is really frightening. On most of my E-mails, I have no idea what state (or nation) the recipient is in.
If state regulation of E-mail is upheld, it means every time you send an E-mail you must figure out what state it is going to, learn the laws of that state, and then obey them. Sounds fine if it's an anti-spam law, but the principle would apply to any regulation the state might dream up. You would get 50 different sents of rules about what emails were legal and which were not. For example, New Mexico tried to pass a law regulating decency in internet traffic to New Mexico. No thanks to granting states that sort of authority.
If you want an opt-out list, it's got to be global or at least federal. Global's hard to do. Unfortunately, unlike phone numbers, I have an infinite number of E-mail addresses so an opt-out list is not so practical. If you allowed patterns you could cover it but you would need a way to authenticate the ownership of the pattern.
You also don't want the list published in cleartext, though it's hard to avoid this. While you could publish a list of hashes of excluded e-mail addresses, it's not hard to extract a lot of the addresses since the real ones come from a finite space. After all spammers have managed to harvest well enough.
That study derives a lot of the figure to damage to New York City, based on jobs and commerce departing the city, and the overall economic slowdown. At least in the case of jobs leaving NYC, that's just a move from one place to another, and not a net negative on the larger scale.
However, I mean the actual damage to the property. The real estate values of the destroyed buildings and the loss from the temporary closures.
Clearly the WTC was a worse disaster because of the people killed, and the fact it was deliberate, and the social, moral and political blows associated with it. I am just pointing out that these shuttles are so expensive they cost more than the real estate in the downtowns of all but the largest cities.
People have died, but the issue is not just the risk to life, but the bang for buck. People don't seem to be realizing this, but based on a number of estimates of the overall cost of the shuttle program and each shuttle (starting at 500M per launch) The destruction of the Columbia was considerably more expensive than the destruction of the World Trade Center.
It's a boondoggle path into space, getting in the way of cheaper, safer, more reliable systems from low-pork teams or private industry.