A Loudon County, Virginia judge sentenced a North Carolina spammer to nine years in prison Friday. His defense attorney complains about the severity of the sentence. I object to its leniency. I have some qualms regarding the death penalty, but my reservations seem to dissipate when the discussion turns to spammers. I spent several hours Saturday deleting an onslaught of hundreds of spam comments. My sense is if you added up the hours devoted to deleting spam, and the money and energy spent by tech geeks attempting to counteract spam, the dollar amount would exceed the gross national product of Ecuador. Spam certainly depletes the Dan National Product, wasting several hours of my time every week. I'm not going to get those hours back.
With all of this in mind, I'm continuing my efforts to close out old comments to undermine the spam robots. This week is your last chance to comment on July's articles. Worth revisiting and commenting upon (while there's still time!) include posts on how the French love of mediocrity breeds hatred of Lance Armstrong, a glance at great moments in American liberalism, a delicious look back upon the Donner Party, VH1's telling of the Guns n' Roses story, my review of Fahrenheit 9/11, and a discussion of vintage video games. Happy reading!
I would have to say that seven years is a little bit much for annoying advertising. I hate spam as much as the next guy, but I would urge the judge to show mercy in this matter.
If you spend hours deleting spam then get SpamBayes. It's free and it works.
9 years? Come on, what is this world coming to. I guess that means I can go out and do some B&E or Grand Theft and get less time than that. There are other things they should be spending our tax money on, like convicting the Illegal Aliens in TX for raping and killing that 16 year old. Mexico and the US are too busy jerking each other off talking about rights for the border jumper.
Just sentence them to read spam 8-10 hours a day. And they have to read it all including all the words down at the bottom of an email put there to trick the spam blockers into thinking it was an email with substance.
Not only that but make a number of the emails with the subject "About commuting your sentence" or "your lawyer called".
James and Ben-T,
I can't be quite certain but I gathered from the article here that this spammer was bilking people out of money to the tune of millions a year. It may have not actually constituted fraud somehow but I definitely got the impression that this tough sentence reflected the illicit gains he got from spamming. If that is the case then he committed a crime equivalent to years of grand theft and so the harshness of the sentence would reflect that. If that is the case than good, I think that so-called "white collar" crime is treated way too mildly in our society even though its effects can often be far more wide reaching than your average stick-em-up thief.
This judge is the man. I picture him giving the spammer the "pound-you-in-the-@$$-prison" speech from Office Space.
But enough of this stuff. Video games! The Atari 2600! I'm nine years old again! And I can't stop using exclamation points! Dan, You have my deepest thanks. I couldn't give you an exact total of the quarters I spent in the Ms. Pac-Man machine at the 7-11 on Wellwood Avenue - suffice it to say, the Slushee machine probably bears a plaque in my honor.
You want addicting games, you're talking just about everything Activision ever did for the 2600. River Raid, Pitfall, Kaboom, Spider Fighter... they even had a Space Shuttle simulator (really!). It was an excellent piece of programming as well. Good times.
PS - anyone else here ever own a 2-XL?
do you think it is right to kill someone? and what happens if they have not done anything wrong.
do you think it is right to kill someone? and what happens if they have not done anything wrong.
