I know that he's a troll, but there are many others, including those moderators that gave him karma points, that believe the posting he stole was his own.
Thanks. I'm flattered when someone that I respect thinks highly of my work. quincyq is just a thief. Being flattered by what he did would be like being flattered that someone liked my motorcycle so much that they stole it.
The comment about this story submitted by quincyq ("Don't just sit there, do something about it !" ) was plagiarized, word for word, from one that I submitted on January 17 in response to an earlier story about this that appeared on Slashdot. Mine was entitled "TELL THEM HOW YOU FEEL!" Click on the link to read the original comment.
I hope that all of the moderators see fit to moderate quincyq down. He is a low-life plagiarist who takes credit for the research, thoughts, and writings of others.
The comment submitted by quincyq ("Don't just sit there, do something about it !" ) was plagiarized, word for word, from one that I submitted on January 17 in response to an earlier story about this that appeared on Slashdot. Mine was entitled "TELL THEM HOW YOU FEEL!" Click on the link to read the original comment.
I urge all moderators to moderate quincyq down. He is nothing but a thieving plagiarist who takes credit for the research, thoughts, and writings of others.
Ignore the subject. That was just a cheap troll to make you read the message (how about a +1 for deviousness?).
Well, I guess if you run windows you gotta get your service packs every few minutes
I just installed Mandrake 7.2. Their biggest claim to fame? The Windows-like OS update feature that grabs and installs the packages automatically. Having recently installed the latest version of Windows (Me) and Mandrake 7.2, I can tell you that there were more updates for Mandrake than Windows.
I will say that Mandrake is the closest thing I've seen yet for an end-user-desktop version of Linux. But, even ignoring the need most businesses have for Windows apps, Linux is still too hard for most users. There are 4 different icons to start various terminal windows and not a single one to start Samba. Instead of "notepad", there is a confusing array of text editors. (Digression: Pick one app of a given type for the "recommended" or "standard" installation. Let the experienced users hunt down add their own as they see fit.) Choosing what daemons should run at startup is hell for someone who is not a Unix guru. Many have no descriptions accessible during install and those descriptions that are provided are often cryptic. There is no consistency to the look & feel of most of the GUI apps. Apps are typically delivered from the web with no installation utility and cryptic (or no) instructions. And all too often, apps are command-line based things with an incomprehensible set of options one types to make them run. Can I get things to work? Sure, if I don't mind spending way too much time to do something that would, under Windows, be easy.
In closing, I use Linux and Microsoft (and BeOS and FreeBSD and Solaris). Each has its place, but Microsoft Windows is the OS that I use the most because of the wealth of software and level of productivity I get with it. YMMV.
I'm going to be blunt: A pedophile that masturbates while looking at simulated kiddie porn is more likely to go to sleep after he has an orgasm than he is to go molest a child. Would you rather have that pedophile sitting in a van outside an elementary school or would you prefer to have him jerking off in front of his computer looking at computer-generated kiddie porn?
People, including pedophiles, can normally recognize the difference between sexual fantasy (as portrayed in x-rated films, videos, magazines, etc.) and reality. Those that cannot are probably going to commit their sexual crimes regardless. If you got hold of a magazine with people being whipped with a cat-o-nine-tails, would you just assume that it must be accepted by society at large as "normal"? Of course not (I hope).
The sole, valid argument against child pornography is that it exploits children. There is no legitimate reason to ban simulated kiddie porn. In fact, giving pedophiles a sexual outlet that doesn't harm children is probably in society's best interests in the long run.
Microsoft can kill CPRM in one, quick stroke. Were Microsoft to announce that future versions of its operating systems would not instal and run on CPRM-equipped disks, the problem would disappear overnight. As much as all of us like Linux, BeOS, Solaris, BSD, etc., it is the marketing might of Microsoft that can deal the death-blow to CPRM. And, given the nightmare that CPRM will be to Microsoft from a support standpoint, they would be well-advised to do just that.
You don't seem to understand the difference between massive R&D expenditures and operational cost. Paying for the cost of getting data to and from the Internet is far different than undertaking a massive R&D effort to design, develop, and implement the Internet. Years of work by countless people went into the Internet and it was funded, throughout its development by the U.S. taxpayer. Now that we were generous enough to welcome your country into the Internet, you seem to feel that we should also grant you control of it. Why should we? Because you would like it better if we did?
Your country didn't invest in the development of the Internet. They are just paying the costs associated with using it. It's like buying a copy of Windows and then insisting that you have a right to attend the Microsoft shareholder's meeting.
To carry the analogies further, it's like asserting that your expenditures for gas, oil, maintenance, and repairs on your Ford car entitle you to a seat on the Board of Directors of Ford Motor Company.
For those Americans who will remind me that the 'Internet' used to be a DARPA project (etc etc): Whats your point?
The point is that it was funded at the expense of the taxpaying United States' citizens. Instead of thanking the U.S. for opening up access to the net, you (as a Canadian) want all countries to be equal partners with no compensation to the U.S.
The U.S. invested the money and took the initiative (and risk of failure) to build the Internet. Why don't you try telling Microsoft, Netscape, and AOL that you want to be an equal partner in their now successful net ventures and see how they react?
When the ICANN extorts $50,000 from an "applicant" just to consider a 3-7 letter long TLD, something is very wrong. When the users of the Internet are excluded from the TLD selection process, there is something very wrong. When ICANN releases TLDs like.coop and.museum, I think that something very crooked has taken place behind closed doors.
Easy to say, but a 14 year old girl trying to find out about birth control may not be as bold as you are.
If the site is giving primarily textual information rather than lots of big pictures, it is much harder to glance at the screen as you're passing by and figure out any of what's on it.
72 point text titles and medical diagrams of the reproductive system are rather easy for even the most casual glance to discern.
Porn sites stick out pretty well.
So do I after I visit them.
I agree that people should not expect the library to "babysit" their kids. That's why I'm not concerned about preventing people from accessing any site. This primarily catches people who believe they have a right to use a public resource (library computers) for accessing porn, and do so.
Frankly, I'd rather that adults look at porn at the library than Beanie Baby collector pages and similar drivel. There is nothing inherently wrong with someone choosing to view seeing sexual images. As someone once said, this country would be a far better place if it had been conquered by Vikings rather than settled by Puritans.
I'm disapointed in those that place the blame on parents for "not supervising their children 24x7". I'm a parent and I'd like to think that at some point before my daughter turns 30, dropping her off at the library to do some research, reading or studying wouldn't be a moral outrage.
What is a moral outrage is the contention by some parents that an entire portion of the public should have their access to the Internet be limited because those parents want to prevent their children from accessing porn. Legislated filtering will not just affect children. Many low-income people have no access to the Internet other than their local public library. Many students doing work for school rely on public library computers for research. And what gets blocked by these filters is everything from information about the holocaust to articles about prostate cancer.
Seems like the older folk (not terribly old either, maybe 35+) likely don't understand just how pervasive the Internet seems to have become.
Well, sonny, I'm on the late side of 39 and have six computers networked together in my house (even have one in a bathroom). I am very aware of how entrenched the Internet is and that is all the more reason that we have to give free and unfiltered access to every U.S. citizen, whether an impoverished inner-city resident at a public library or a six-figure software engineer in the suburbs.
ICAAN could have made our lives alot easier by giving us a.sex or.xxx TLD. We could have neatly cubbyholed all of the porn. Whether or not you block it is another story altogether.
I have wrestled with this problem in my mind a lot and I am glad that ICANN did not provide a.sex or.xxx TLD. Censorship should not be easy, acceptable, or effective and TLDs should be approved because they make it easier to access information, not suppress it.
P.S. I do think that ICANN's choices for new TLDs are incomprehensible. Are museums and cooperatives so numerous on the net that they really need their own TLDs?
I agree. I have seen it myself and while I agree that it is a problem, I don't believe that it is so much of a problem that everyone who can't afford a computer at home should have their net access limited.
There are dangers everywhere and we should never give up the freedoms that our founders fought and died for just so some kid doesn't see naked people on a computer screen.
The best "filtering" method I have seen is simple, easy to administer, and free: turn the computer so that the screen faces a public area. Eliminates porn pretty well.
It also eliminates a young person's access to sites with information about venereal disease and birth control. Women with breast cancer are also unlikely to spend time with relevent web sites up on the screen. Men suffering from impotence are not going to visit sites that provide information. The list just goes on.
The answer is simple: Parents need to quit using the library as a daycare center and librarians as baby sitters. If you can't trust your little smut-monger with Internet access, he does not belong unsupervised in a public library.
I am amazed that people get this hung up about kids having access to porn. It's not like it's forced on them by Netscape. The Disney web site doesn't suddenly redirect them to www.shemalesxxx.com. If they go to a porn site, they almost always do it by choice. If it is by accident, they can hit the "back" button. I doubt that glancing at porn long enough to recognize it as such is going to emotionally scar some kid.
Rather than just complain on here, I sent an e-mail off to Deidre Moore, CMGI's VP of Communications in the PR department. I told her(?) that if CMGI (Altavista's parent company) went forward with the lawsuits, I would boycott their search engine and their advertisers and would recommend that others do the same.
Will one e-mail convince them to back down? Probably not. But if enough people let them know how they feel, it might have some effect, even if that is just to limit how far they go with this ill-conceived idea.
For those so inclined, here is Ms. Moore's contact information:
PUBLIC RELATIONS
Deidre Moore
VP, Communications
dmoore@cmgi.com
Tel: 978.684.3655
Fax: 978.684.3814
Please be polite, businesslike, and civil in your communications to her. Threats, vulgarity, and rudeness would only detract from our messages.
I remember when a p75 was a high-end machine (and a good 486 was over $1000)! Come on, people...
I remember when a 4mhz Z80 with 64K of RAM was a high-end machine. Mine was fancy. I added a real-time clock to it! Woohoo!
I do see your point about the non-standard use of the box. What gets me is the people who want to make it into a general purpose computer. What good is a P75 with 8MB of RAM as a PC? Add $100 for a hard drive and all of your time and you've got more into it than you can buy a used P166 desktop machine for.
It kills me when people claim their time is valuable. Time is time is time.
My time has value and I bill based on the number of hours I work. If I am going to spend my limited time on a project, it's either because the end result will be worth the effort or because I will enjoy what I am doing. Hacking an outdated 133mhz set-top box satisfies neither criteria. I could spend the same time doing billable consulting work and use that money to buy a complete, current generation Athlon system.
My time is worth enough that, instead of hacking at some little POS set-top machine, I'd much rather just buy a decent box. I mean, come on! a "decent" box (interpret that however you like) certainly outperforms one of these things, and I can slap one together for, what, $350, maybe? And, generally, I have enough extra parts around my place that I'm only buying a few key items!
Amen! I did the i-Opener thing and now have one in the downstairs bathroom. Now I can take an e-Dump!
But the i-Opener had some important features lacking in the Acer device. It had an LCD flat screen. The CPU ran at 200mhz (vs 133 in the Acer). It had 32MB of RAM vs. 8MB in the Acer and could be expanded with industry-standard SODIMMs.
The Acer seems like a waste of time to me. It's slow, lacks RAM, requires a TV or monitor for output, can't support DMA hard disk transfers (according to another/.er), and has very limited expansion capabilities.
If you want to do it for the challenge, knock yourself out. If you want a computer, put one together at today's dirt-cheap prices and have something truly worthwhile.
"Spamming is the scourge of electronic-mail and newsgroups on the Internet. It can seriously interfere with the operation of public services, to say nothing of the effect it may have on any individual's e-mail mail system.... Spammers are, in effect, taking resources away from users and service suppliers without compensation and without authorization."
-- Vint Cerf, Senior Vice President, MCI
and acknowleged "Father of the Internet"
Sorry, but I'll take his opinion over yours any day.
From the www.cauce.org (Coalition Against Unsolicited Commercial E-mail) web site:
Recent public comments by AOL are a useful point of reference: of the estimated 30 million email messages each day, about 30% on average was unsolicited commercial email. With volumes such as that, it's a tremendous burden shifted to the ISP to process and store that amount of data. Volumes like that may undoubtedly contribute to many of the access, speed, and reliability problems we've seen with lots of ISPs. Indeed, many large ISPs have suffered major system outages as the result of massive junk email campaigns. If huge outfits like Netcom and AOL can barely cope with the flood, it is no wonder that smaller ISPs are dying under the crush of spam.
If you don't like your ISPs slack policy of dealing with spammers, choose another. If none exist, then the problem must not be that bad.
That's like saying "Unless you can find a store that has completely eliminated shoplifting, it must not be that much of a problem." Like stores, ISPs are businesses. They balance costs against revenues and savings. It is prohibitively expensive to either ignore spam completely or to filter out every bit of it. The most cost-effective solution falls somewhere in-between. The difference is that stealing from a store is illegal while stealing from an ISP is not (and would not be if you had your way).
Re:cellphone, schmellphone... if you're so clever.
on
Norway Bans Spam
·
· Score: 2
You are a troll, a spammer, or an idiot. You think that abuse departments at ISPs have no cost. You don't know the difference between bandwidth (e.g., streaming video) and storage. You seem to think that additional spam requires no additional resources other than bandwidth. You don't understand the difference between filtering e-mail and hiding your address. You think that it's fine to be inconvenienced by having to set up filters, hide your e-mail addresses, use mail forwarding accounts that further reduce the speed and reliability of e-mail, and then pay higher ISP charges so that the spammers can do this to you.
Go away and read your spam. It's not like your time has any value.
There is more than enough organization and technology in place to prevent mass abuse of spam without government intervention.
Then why does it remain such a large problem?
What if a friend signs you up to a mailing list?
It should not be possible for someone to sign you up to a mailing list without you having to return a confirmation e-mail.
What about mass political mailings that are of immense informative value?
What is of "immense informative value" to you might be radical nut-speak to me. I don't want Rush Limbaugh, Ralph Nader, and Jerry Falwell deciding that I need to receive their e-mail because of its "immense informative value."
What if a company is limited in their competitve tools to fight entrenched near-monopolistic companies and mass, unsolicited email messages is one of their only options?
I hope that you are kidding with this one. Are you telling me that every company that releases an office suite to compete with Microsoft Office has a moral right to spam the net?
Do we really want to vest this kind of regulatory control in a government that could potentially abuse it?
I would much sooner entrust this control to democratically elected representatives than to trust in the judgement of the greedy, unethical people who now bombard us with spam.
If there were no feasible way for the private sector to regulate itself, regulation might be worth considering. However, that is not the case. Upstream providers can filter mail, refuse to route packets from offending domains, use tools such as ORBS to block mail, etc. That's not even getting into personal efforts to deal with spam.
If you operate a business, you cannot tolerate a mail system that blocks the ORBS-listed systems. Your customers don't care about the fact that the ISP that supplies their company Internet access also has an open relay used by some spammer in Taiwan. The technical solutions don't work.
As to my "personal efforts", I have spent about $100 in e-mail filtering software (please, save the Linux/GNU/GPL/Open Software speech for another thread). I have spent countless hours dealing with spam, sending complaints, setting up filters, doing traceroutes, whois lookups, and IP block lookups. I can't distribute my cell phone e-mail address. I have to sift through filtered spam on a weekly basis to make sure that the filters did not inadvertently catch a message that was not spam.
And, if all this fails, a person can use the civil courts as a last resort to arbitrate particularly offending cases.
That's the whole reason spam works. If a spammer steals one penny from each of 1 million people to pay his advertising costs, he will have stolen $10,000, but no one person has suffered enough of a loss to take legal action.
The Internet does not have to be the wild west. Laws that extend our basic sense of values into the digital domain are perfectly reasonable. Junk faxes are illegal for the same reason that spam should be -- much of the cost of the advertising is borne by the recipient. Why not make spam illegal?
Slashdot Mirror
I know that he's a troll, but there are many others, including those moderators that gave him karma points, that believe the posting he stole was his own.
It is kind of ironic that, in response, quincyq plagiarized a reply that I made to the original story...
What a scumball!
I hope that all of the moderators see fit to moderate quincyq down. He is a low-life plagiarist who takes credit for the research, thoughts, and writings of others.
I urge all moderators to moderate quincyq down. He is nothing but a thieving plagiarist who takes credit for the research, thoughts, and writings of others.
Well, I guess if you run windows you gotta get your service packs every few minutes
I just installed Mandrake 7.2. Their biggest claim to fame? The Windows-like OS update feature that grabs and installs the packages automatically. Having recently installed the latest version of Windows (Me) and Mandrake 7.2, I can tell you that there were more updates for Mandrake than Windows.
I will say that Mandrake is the closest thing I've seen yet for an end-user-desktop version of Linux. But, even ignoring the need most businesses have for Windows apps, Linux is still too hard for most users. There are 4 different icons to start various terminal windows and not a single one to start Samba. Instead of "notepad", there is a confusing array of text editors. (Digression: Pick one app of a given type for the "recommended" or "standard" installation. Let the experienced users hunt down add their own as they see fit.) Choosing what daemons should run at startup is hell for someone who is not a Unix guru. Many have no descriptions accessible during install and those descriptions that are provided are often cryptic. There is no consistency to the look & feel of most of the GUI apps. Apps are typically delivered from the web with no installation utility and cryptic (or no) instructions. And all too often, apps are command-line based things with an incomprehensible set of options one types to make them run. Can I get things to work? Sure, if I don't mind spending way too much time to do something that would, under Windows, be easy.
In closing, I use Linux and Microsoft (and BeOS and FreeBSD and Solaris). Each has its place, but Microsoft Windows is the OS that I use the most because of the wealth of software and level of productivity I get with it. YMMV.
People, including pedophiles, can normally recognize the difference between sexual fantasy (as portrayed in x-rated films, videos, magazines, etc.) and reality. Those that cannot are probably going to commit their sexual crimes regardless. If you got hold of a magazine with people being whipped with a cat-o-nine-tails, would you just assume that it must be accepted by society at large as "normal"? Of course not (I hope).
The sole, valid argument against child pornography is that it exploits children. There is no legitimate reason to ban simulated kiddie porn. In fact, giving pedophiles a sexual outlet that doesn't harm children is probably in society's best interests in the long run.
Microsoft can kill CPRM in one, quick stroke. Were Microsoft to announce that future versions of its operating systems would not instal and run on CPRM-equipped disks, the problem would disappear overnight. As much as all of us like Linux, BeOS, Solaris, BSD, etc., it is the marketing might of Microsoft that can deal the death-blow to CPRM. And, given the nightmare that CPRM will be to Microsoft from a support standpoint, they would be well-advised to do just that.
Your country didn't invest in the development of the Internet. They are just paying the costs associated with using it. It's like buying a copy of Windows and then insisting that you have a right to attend the Microsoft shareholder's meeting.
To carry the analogies further, it's like asserting that your expenditures for gas, oil, maintenance, and repairs on your Ford car entitle you to a seat on the Board of Directors of Ford Motor Company.
I can tell you why I don't: I do not want to tell every nut-case on the net where I live.
The point is that it was funded at the expense of the taxpaying United States' citizens. Instead of thanking the U.S. for opening up access to the net, you (as a Canadian) want all countries to be equal partners with no compensation to the U.S.
The U.S. invested the money and took the initiative (and risk of failure) to build the Internet. Why don't you try telling Microsoft, Netscape, and AOL that you want to be an equal partner in their now successful net ventures and see how they react?
I applaud the ACLU for getting involved.
Easy to say, but a 14 year old girl trying to find out about birth control may not be as bold as you are.
If the site is giving primarily textual information rather than lots of big pictures, it is much harder to glance at the screen as you're passing by and figure out any of what's on it.
72 point text titles and medical diagrams of the reproductive system are rather easy for even the most casual glance to discern.
Porn sites stick out pretty well.
So do I after I visit them.
I agree that people should not expect the library to "babysit" their kids. That's why I'm not concerned about preventing people from accessing any site. This primarily catches people who believe they have a right to use a public resource (library computers) for accessing porn, and do so.
Frankly, I'd rather that adults look at porn at the library than Beanie Baby collector pages and similar drivel. There is nothing inherently wrong with someone choosing to view seeing sexual images. As someone once said, this country would be a far better place if it had been conquered by Vikings rather than settled by Puritans.
What is a moral outrage is the contention by some parents that an entire portion of the public should have their access to the Internet be limited because those parents want to prevent their children from accessing porn. Legislated filtering will not just affect children. Many low-income people have no access to the Internet other than their local public library. Many students doing work for school rely on public library computers for research. And what gets blocked by these filters is everything from information about the holocaust to articles about prostate cancer.
Seems like the older folk (not terribly old either, maybe 35+) likely don't understand just how pervasive the Internet seems to have become.
Well, sonny, I'm on the late side of 39 and have six computers networked together in my house (even have one in a bathroom). I am very aware of how entrenched the Internet is and that is all the more reason that we have to give free and unfiltered access to every U.S. citizen, whether an impoverished inner-city resident at a public library or a six-figure software engineer in the suburbs.
I have wrestled with this problem in my mind a lot and I am glad that ICANN did not provide a .sex or .xxx TLD. Censorship should not be easy, acceptable, or effective and TLDs should be approved because they make it easier to access information, not suppress it.
P.S. I do think that ICANN's choices for new TLDs are incomprehensible. Are museums and cooperatives so numerous on the net that they really need their own TLDs?
I agree. I have seen it myself and while I agree that it is a problem, I don't believe that it is so much of a problem that everyone who can't afford a computer at home should have their net access limited.
There are dangers everywhere and we should never give up the freedoms that our founders fought and died for just so some kid doesn't see naked people on a computer screen.
It also eliminates a young person's access to sites with information about venereal disease and birth control. Women with breast cancer are also unlikely to spend time with relevent web sites up on the screen. Men suffering from impotence are not going to visit sites that provide information. The list just goes on.
The answer is simple: Parents need to quit using the library as a daycare center and librarians as baby sitters. If you can't trust your little smut-monger with Internet access, he does not belong unsupervised in a public library.
I am amazed that people get this hung up about kids having access to porn. It's not like it's forced on them by Netscape. The Disney web site doesn't suddenly redirect them to www.shemalesxxx.com. If they go to a porn site, they almost always do it by choice. If it is by accident, they can hit the "back" button. I doubt that glancing at porn long enough to recognize it as such is going to emotionally scar some kid.
Will one e-mail convince them to back down? Probably not. But if enough people let them know how they feel, it might have some effect, even if that is just to limit how far they go with this ill-conceived idea.
For those so inclined, here is Ms. Moore's contact information:
PUBLIC RELATIONS
Deidre Moore
VP, Communications
dmoore@cmgi.com
Tel: 978.684.3655
Fax: 978.684.3814
Please be polite, businesslike, and civil in your communications to her. Threats, vulgarity, and rudeness would only detract from our messages.
I remember when a 4mhz Z80 with 64K of RAM was a high-end machine. Mine was fancy. I added a real-time clock to it! Woohoo!
I do see your point about the non-standard use of the box. What gets me is the people who want to make it into a general purpose computer. What good is a P75 with 8MB of RAM as a PC? Add $100 for a hard drive and all of your time and you've got more into it than you can buy a used P166 desktop machine for.
My time has value and I bill based on the number of hours I work. If I am going to spend my limited time on a project, it's either because the end result will be worth the effort or because I will enjoy what I am doing. Hacking an outdated 133mhz set-top box satisfies neither criteria. I could spend the same time doing billable consulting work and use that money to buy a complete, current generation Athlon system.
Amen! I did the i-Opener thing and now have one in the downstairs bathroom. Now I can take an e-Dump!
But the i-Opener had some important features lacking in the Acer device. It had an LCD flat screen. The CPU ran at 200mhz (vs 133 in the Acer). It had 32MB of RAM vs. 8MB in the Acer and could be expanded with industry-standard SODIMMs.
The Acer seems like a waste of time to me. It's slow, lacks RAM, requires a TV or monitor for output, can't support DMA hard disk transfers (according to another /.er), and has very limited expansion capabilities.
If you want to do it for the challenge, knock yourself out. If you want a computer, put one together at today's dirt-cheap prices and have something truly worthwhile.
"Spamming is the scourge of electronic-mail and newsgroups on the Internet. It can seriously interfere with the operation of public services, to say nothing of the effect it may have on any individual's e-mail mail system. ... Spammers are, in effect, taking resources away from users and service suppliers without compensation and without authorization."
-- Vint Cerf, Senior Vice President, MCI and acknowleged "Father of the Internet"
Sorry, but I'll take his opinion over yours any day.
From the www.cauce.org (Coalition Against Unsolicited Commercial E-mail) web site:
Recent public comments by AOL are a useful point of reference: of the estimated 30 million email messages each day, about 30% on average was unsolicited commercial email. With volumes such as that, it's a tremendous burden shifted to the ISP to process and store that amount of data. Volumes like that may undoubtedly contribute to many of the access, speed, and reliability problems we've seen with lots of ISPs. Indeed, many large ISPs have suffered major system outages as the result of massive junk email campaigns. If huge outfits like Netcom and AOL can barely cope with the flood, it is no wonder that smaller ISPs are dying under the crush of spam.
If you don't like your ISPs slack policy of dealing with spammers, choose another. If none exist, then the problem must not be that bad.
That's like saying "Unless you can find a store that has completely eliminated shoplifting, it must not be that much of a problem." Like stores, ISPs are businesses. They balance costs against revenues and savings. It is prohibitively expensive to either ignore spam completely or to filter out every bit of it. The most cost-effective solution falls somewhere in-between. The difference is that stealing from a store is illegal while stealing from an ISP is not (and would not be if you had your way).
Go away and read your spam. It's not like your time has any value.
Then why does it remain such a large problem?
What if a friend signs you up to a mailing list?
It should not be possible for someone to sign you up to a mailing list without you having to return a confirmation e-mail.
What about mass political mailings that are of immense informative value?
What is of "immense informative value" to you might be radical nut-speak to me. I don't want Rush Limbaugh, Ralph Nader, and Jerry Falwell deciding that I need to receive their e-mail because of its "immense informative value."
What if a company is limited in their competitve tools to fight entrenched near-monopolistic companies and mass, unsolicited email messages is one of their only options?
I hope that you are kidding with this one. Are you telling me that every company that releases an office suite to compete with Microsoft Office has a moral right to spam the net?
Do we really want to vest this kind of regulatory control in a government that could potentially abuse it?
I would much sooner entrust this control to democratically elected representatives than to trust in the judgement of the greedy, unethical people who now bombard us with spam.
If there were no feasible way for the private sector to regulate itself, regulation might be worth considering. However, that is not the case. Upstream providers can filter mail, refuse to route packets from offending domains, use tools such as ORBS to block mail, etc. That's not even getting into personal efforts to deal with spam.
If you operate a business, you cannot tolerate a mail system that blocks the ORBS-listed systems. Your customers don't care about the fact that the ISP that supplies their company Internet access also has an open relay used by some spammer in Taiwan. The technical solutions don't work.
As to my "personal efforts", I have spent about $100 in e-mail filtering software (please, save the Linux/GNU/GPL/Open Software speech for another thread). I have spent countless hours dealing with spam, sending complaints, setting up filters, doing traceroutes, whois lookups, and IP block lookups. I can't distribute my cell phone e-mail address. I have to sift through filtered spam on a weekly basis to make sure that the filters did not inadvertently catch a message that was not spam.
And, if all this fails, a person can use the civil courts as a last resort to arbitrate particularly offending cases.
That's the whole reason spam works. If a spammer steals one penny from each of 1 million people to pay his advertising costs, he will have stolen $10,000, but no one person has suffered enough of a loss to take legal action.
The Internet does not have to be the wild west. Laws that extend our basic sense of values into the digital domain are perfectly reasonable. Junk faxes are illegal for the same reason that spam should be -- much of the cost of the advertising is borne by the recipient. Why not make spam illegal?