And Eric Rudolph is pleading guilty. It's days like today that make me wish prisons were even worse than they are.

If the guy had killed someone, he wouldn't serve 9 years.

This guy is a thief. He stole minutes of my sweet, precious time. Across all of humanity, he probably robbed us all of many lifetimes of time. I have no problem with his sentence.

He broke the law, he goes to jail, blah, blah blah... I just can't get that worked up about spam. I get something like 300+ spam emails a day, but with a little effort I've got my system set up so I only see 3 or 4. Granted, the stuff I get via email is usually worse than the postal mail junk, but considering that I fill half a recycle basket each week with envelopes I don't even bother to open, I'd much rather be going after paper junk mailers than electronic ones.

When I get annoyed at spam I get annoyed at the people who designed a system that lets you get away with making up your FROM address with no verification whatsoever, not the people who exploited the stupidity.

SMTP is a relic of a simpler time, Dug. It should have evolved with the times, but two things at least held it back. One, verification is a much thornier problem than one might think. Two, the difficulty of evolving a wildly popular standard is the wild popularity of the standard. Well, and three, there are powerful entities whose interests are well served by an insecure, unreliable, universal message system.

I get pissed at spam, too, but, man, $750,000 a month?? For that kind of money, I'd have to consider the weight of the benefit to myself compared the cost to others. Can't say I wouldn't at least be tempted to consider in favor of the benefit to myself.

Of course, I'd also have to lie to myself and pretend no one was actually opening the spam I was sending them. But when bad faith enters in, your utilitarian argument is probably in danger. *sigh*

It's not just stealing precious minutes of our lives, but money and probably health, too. I mean, half or more of the Viagra sold through spammers is fake, and that puts people who respond to this in a lot of danger. The man has preyed on society, and I'm glad that he's been stopped.

One thing I'd be very interested in is the profile of the person who responds positively to the spam (and who presumably drive this system, as opposed to the stuck-in-evolution SMTP standard that enables the system). And then find a way to show them reality-based alternatives.

Yeah, it's not like this guy was using spam to raise money for limbless orphans. He was a spammer who was stealing network resources in order to peddle false offers. He was a thief, a liar and a con artist. This don't hate the player, hate the game attitude is bullshit. Hate 'em both. Fuck 'im.

As fiend said, SMTP is a relic of its time. To blame it is to blame Henry Ford for the obnoxiousness of the Ford Excursion.

How else am I going to enlarge my penis?

Seriously, Jeremy Jaynes should have SPAMMING ASSHOLE carved all over his body - with toenail clippers - by the 1st 50 people in his address book. And then he should be forced to pay all 50 people $1,000.00 if they finish in the next 24 hours and pass this along to 5 more friends from their address book.