On spam and spammers
Open question to the community: is there an effective, ethical, and legal way to prevent these people from doing what they do? If they aren't filling up my mail with C14L15 and V*I*A*G*R*A ads (more amusing was the one that promised that I could "Increase by one full cup size in two weeks - guaranteed!" to which my reply was "To hell with that - lots of pizza and beer would work fine on me and be a lot more fun than some stupid pill."), the spammers are screwing up my referrer stats, hijacking domain names - for example, one of the referrer spams I had was a soccer website registered in the dot-org namespace - or otherwise finding ways to piss off 99.8% of the population in the search of a fast buck.
I'm kind of wondering if there isn't a clear psychological profile developing of these people - "sociopath" comes to mind but I'm no shrink. Any shrinks out there are more than welcome to add their ideas, as well as lambasting me for using the term "shrink."
Anyhow, I guess the best solution to spammers is to wrap them in barbed wire and fire them into the Sun. Unfortunately, that's neither ethical nor legal, and hardly practical, so let's put our heads together to find a better solution, neh?
