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Comment Re:Directly contacting gov agencies. Good idea? (Score 5, Insightful) 137

The Secret Service agent I spoke with was interested, but let me know why he couldn't justify further investigation. Without a clear abused victim with a clear monetary damage of at least $30,000, he couldn't justify obtaining the necessary necessary agency time to get the warrants to track the spammers and the fraud. So I learned a hard lesson: getting the specific criminal act of large enough damage to *justify* prosecutorial interest is key. It's why so many low scale spammers and fraudsters continue so long: they operate under the radar of police or FBI or Secret Service wire fraud thresholds.

On the other hand... had that spammer tried to sell *one* bootleg copy of a movie...

Comment Re:Or not so misinformed (Score 1) 82

It's not quite that misinformed. Emacs lisp is a special purpose language. ...

Well... It's a version of LISP customized for text-editor use. At its core it's still LISP. [And you're talking to someone who has used Emacs and written Emacs LISP, as well as Common LISP, Franz LISP (and ported the interpreter from BSD to SunOS and Ultrix), and InterLISP-D, since the mid 1980s... So, while certainly not an expert, I have some Emacs and LISP exposure. :-) ]

Comment Wait, what? (Score 4, Informative) 82

...instead of "special-purpose scripting languages" like Emacs ...

One of the least informed statements I've ever read on /.

Ignoring the fact that Emacs is an editor, not a scripting language, one can do just about anything in LISP (and Emacs LISP), and LISP itself has been around since 1958. I even got paid as a research assistant in college in 1985 to work in LISP on a Xerox 1108 graphical workstation using InterLISP-D (still have the manual). The whole OS was written in LISP and the system had ethernet, mouse and 19" gray-scale monitor. It was fucking awesome.

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