Btw, you might be interested in what Sanford W. recently said:
http://cnn.com/TECH/computing/9804/16/spam_king.ap/
Have acts of physical violence against spammers and their businesses
ever been reported? As emails are no evidence in court, and legal
action can be delayed virtually indefinitely, termination of spammers
in physical space (Achille's heel at least of the nonvirtual
merchandize) should be a natural autoregulation mechanism. It a)
provides low-latency effective deterrence b) remove individuals
from the (small) foolhardy-spammer pool (albeit by small increments).
Of course relying on naturally occuring Holy Avenger fruitcakes
is somewhat difficult the lack of their abundance considered, so can
there be an effective mechanism to funnel resources of irate targets
into spammer termination? Future crypto infrastructure may provide an
anonymous digicash user-to-avenger nexus, allowing interactive resource
allocation to known spammers (authenticadedly indentified, to protect
against turning lilly-white users for spammers). This provides a
nice positive autofeedback loop between number of spam hits and the
head money allocated to termination of the offender -- to the effect
that the most pressing problems get removed first.
Wouldn't we all sometimes gladly pay $5 just for a short snuff video snippet?
ha-ha only serious,
ciao,
'gene
P.S. Of course above scheme is also applicable to other unpopular
public figures, which will probably mean it to be difficult to
implement.