I'm not sure how to parse that statement. Are you saying that you are against something that Walker has been openly favoring, or are you taking a new stance in favor of kicking small animals?

Being as you already replied to my JE on the Kevlar Kandidate I don't see a reason to re-post the sources (not that you likely read them from there either).

First, it was in part a continuation of Walker vs. Milwaukee. Numerically he has an advantage as the greater Milwaukee area is less than half of Wisconsin's population. Even if you add the Milwaukee area and the Madison areas together you barely crack the half-way mark on the state's population, and there are plenty of people in Madison (and Milwaukee suburbs / exurbs) who will vote against their own interests.

Second, Walker looks so darn good on camera. Put a cowboy hat on him, and he'll be all set to ride in to the oval office.

OK, you just suggested that Obama has done nothing. How many comments will it take before you go back to your conspiracy theories about him poised for (or having already initiated) world domination?

It is a lot easier to energize a smaller population.

I expect his file was probably indexed by a search engine (he does talk about it fairly often in his blog) and the botnet found it there. The botnet isn't smart enough to know that the email addresses aren't real - it only knows they are valid - so it went ahead and went for it. Hell if you were looking to compromise email addresses for your own nefarious purposes and had a small army of compromised PCs to attempt the password hacking, you wouldn't care if you were attempting to access valid addresses or not.

Ahh, yes. If the Teflon Candidate (TM) set your heart aflutter back in 08 and 12, then the Kevlar Kandidate should really get you going. Cast much in the same mold, the Kevlar Kandidate manages to turn many of the Teflon Candidate's most memorable traits up to 11:

• Proven and repeat animosity towards the working class
• Repeat and blatant disregard for the state's largest city (you know, where all those non-wealthy people live)
• Contempt towards public transportation
• Hatred towards DC
• • With some added bonuses as well!
• Previous track record of ballot-stuffing and other electoral shenanigans
• Campaign videos that demonize a business that was started in his home state, by a family from his home state

Can it get any better than that?

I have told you this before, and I am telling you this again. I vote for the candidate based on what they say they will do. I had to choose between a candidate who plainly stated he would torpedo my career and one who did not. There was no other choice as a vote for any other would only end up working against me.

Now, I will concur that the results have been different from the promises. One could say that Lewis Black had it right in Stark Raving Black:

Now, if you want to try to make an argument that the democrats have always been conservatives and the republicans were always just slightly more insane, that is slightly more difficult to construct. Certainly our democrats from recent memory have been conservative, but whether that was by intent or simply by cowardice is unclear at this point. I am not aware of anything prior to 2008 that could have clued us in to the fact that we were choosing between two conservatives in the booth.

This time you only did two consecutive JEs about me. I'm a little disappointed. I'm pretty sure you hit 3 or 4 last time around.

Stupid games like not wanting to be unemployed? Stupid games like wanting to be able to take care of my family financially?

One, you only vote for a president every four years. Voting once does not indicate that you endorse everything that person does after you vote for them - especially when they do essentially none of what they campaigned to do.

Second, had I voted for anyone else I would have been aiding the aspirations of someone who wants me unemployed.

And you could hardly be more wrong or less logical.

Online job applications are designed to make it as easy as possible for employers to trim the list of applicants quickly. There are a lot of people looking for not-a-lot of jobs. The logic here is that if someone can't fill out the application correctly they probably wouldn't be a very good fit for the job.

Now, whether or not that logic is valid is another question to ask.

And which of those actually increase the expected cost to the spammers? Most spammers are in second and third world countries that have no enforced laws against this anyways. In the highly unlikely event that one is actually jailed or killed, there are plenty more in the same country who aspire to follow in that person's footsteps.

The investment for the spammer is trivial.

In many cases, no. Spammers are often paid for the number of messages they send out, regardless of how many turn into sales or are even read. The destination addresses generally need to be only valid for the spammers to get paid.

If that were the case then why does the volume of spam - and the wealth of the largest spammers - continue to rise with every passing year? The only times that spam volumes have ever gone down are when botnets are disrupted (which causes a few days' stagnation) or when payments are interrupted (which causes a much longer stagnation).

I voted for him because with him I had at least a meager chance of keeping my job. He does not pay my job himself, but others want people like me permanently unemployed. I do not expect him or anyone else to give me something for nothing.

That makes no sense, whatsoever. I openly and repeatedly disagree with basically every piece of legislation that President Lawnchair has signed. I repeatedly point out that he has been the most conservative president to date in our country's history.

Victim of what, exactly?

Can you show an example that would be better? I have asked you many times and you conveniently cower away when I do.

I hadn't even considered applying for a patent office job before, but now they are definitely on my radar...

I voted for him because it was better than voting for someone who wanted me unemployed.

That said, I would not consider it the same as "defending" him, and it does not appear to be what smitty was referring to, either. After all, if that was it then all I would have to say is "I will never vote for President Lawnchair for POTUS again" and he should be happy. Instead he is going for some sense of "defending" that is vastly more obtuse.

That is part of it...

I will argue that at the root they actually are the same. A spammer and a drug dealer have in common the motivation to make money. A spammer cares no more - or less - about the condition of the customer than does a drug dealer. For that matter, plenty of spammers effectively are drug dealers, spamvertising for sites that sell (often counterfeit) drugs online.

While spam does not require much for resources, it does require an economic motivator. Spammers very rarely are webmasters themselves, they usually are paid by other companies to send out spam.

That's not entirely true. As I mentioned before, spammers do what they do for money. If they don't get paid, there is no incentive for them to send out spam. Disrupt the money enough and the spam rapidly drops. When we instead keep trying to come up with alternative hardware and/or algorithms for spam filtering and detection, we just encourage the spammers to find new ways around it so they can get paid.

They need to stop encouraging filtering. Filtering email will never resolve the spam epidemic. Filtering only encourages spammers to craft ever-more-obfuscated spam to drive down the signal-to-noise ratio and improve the chances of their spam getting through.

Spamcop and others, if they actually want to perform a valuable service, need to put their profits elsewhere. Namely, they need to start working on disrupting the flow of money to the spammers themselves. Spam is an economic problem. Treating it otherwise is just stupid. Spammers don't do what they do to piss you off (regardless of how some may feel otherwise), they do it to make money. You also cannot solve the problem by exposing, jailing, or murdering spammers (regardless of whether or not it makes you feel better) as it does not resolve the profit motive.

There are demonstrated avenues where one can disrupt the flow of (often illegal) money. If Spammers don't get paid, they don't send spam.