Would'nt it be possible to have a simple law requiring all spam (er... valuable retail offers) to contain a standard tagline in their header, something neutral but obvious like 'COMMERCIAL EMAIL'? You'd have to be specific in the legislation so that only one character string was acceptable to avoid having spammers insert non-printing characters, etc., but it could be done. After that, it would take about 2 seconds to add an option that will let people delete these messages as soon as they reach your server.
No free speech problem, since the spammers are still free to send their messages. I'd just be choosing not to view them. People who actually wanted to see spam for some reason could opt in at their ISP. I'd be willing to guess that it wouldn't even hurt the spam business too much because spam-haters like me never buy anything advertised via email on principle.
The one thing I don't know is how to allow real (meaning actually opted-in) email through when I've really requested information on a product. So here's a challenge to all you slashdotters - how can you phrase a law to only allow truly requested messages through without opening a loophole for the MonsterHuts?
Let's try to clear this up once and for all. Nintendo is based out of Japan which uses the metric system, ergo Nintendo is metric. Therefore the proper units are not 'tera/terra' etc., but are as follows:
magnetoresistance
Super magnetoresistance
magnetoresistance 64
GMR Cube
We now return you to your regularly scheduled pedantic flamewar...
OK, suppose I really love Celine (yeah, yeah, it's a big hypothetical, I know) and am willing to forgive her for being willing to trash my computer just by playing her crappy music. It would seem that all I'd have to do is put her CD-like-thing into a normal player, connect the output cable to the microphone input of my computer and hit play to digitize an analog version of her disc via my system's input port, now sans the iMac destructo ray. Once this is done, just upload the file somewhere and share it with everyone else.
I don't mean to make apologies for the Special Olympians who came up with this scheme, and I'm sure the odd snobbish audiophile will complain that only 99.999% of the audio quality is conserved this way, but the point is that it'd be so easy to defeat any semi-CD encoding scheme with this method that mebbe they'll figure it out and just give up.
Celine for the masses! What can I say, I must just have a thing for bony Canadian divas.
theMightyE
Slashdot Mirror
No free speech problem, since the spammers are still free to send their messages. I'd just be choosing not to view them. People who actually wanted to see spam for some reason could opt in at their ISP. I'd be willing to guess that it wouldn't even hurt the spam business too much because spam-haters like me never buy anything advertised via email on principle.
The one thing I don't know is how to allow real (meaning actually opted-in) email through when I've really requested information on a product. So here's a challenge to all you slashdotters - how can you phrase a law to only allow truly requested messages through without opening a loophole for the MonsterHuts?
The Mighty E
magnetoresistance
Super magnetoresistance
magnetoresistance 64
GMR Cube
We now return you to your regularly scheduled pedantic flamewar...
OK, suppose I really love Celine (yeah, yeah, it's a big hypothetical, I know) and am willing to forgive her for being willing to trash my computer just by playing her crappy music. It would seem that all I'd have to do is put her CD-like-thing into a normal player, connect the output cable to the microphone input of my computer and hit play to digitize an analog version of her disc via my system's input port, now sans the iMac destructo ray. Once this is done, just upload the file somewhere and share it with everyone else. I don't mean to make apologies for the Special Olympians who came up with this scheme, and I'm sure the odd snobbish audiophile will complain that only 99.999% of the audio quality is conserved this way, but the point is that it'd be so easy to defeat any semi-CD encoding scheme with this method that mebbe they'll figure it out and just give up. Celine for the masses! What can I say, I must just have a thing for bony Canadian divas. theMightyE