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.

Wait, which side of the argument are you trying to take here? Two messages ago you again reached for your tired and baseless accusation of me "defending" President Lawnchair. Now you claim I am "disowning" him instead.

It is noted that you again abandoned your entire argument and responded to not a single question. I'm sorry that i have angered you so.

I can when you call him that from one side of your mouth, while the other side is simultaneously claiming that he is in the process of launching us immediately and irreversibly into a totalitarian socialist nightmare state. A clown is thoroughly incapable of doing such a thing, period. I'm not criticizing your silly "rodeo clown" bit but rather pointing out that it flatly contradicts your bit about him being a fascist mastermind.

So why can't you pick just one? Hell, why can't you even stick to just one for five minutes at a time?

But indeed, he is just a servant to his corporate masters. Just as every other president has been for a very very long time.

There you go again with your fantasy about me "defending" President Lawnchair.

Chew on this for a moment, if you will. You know I don't care for conservatives. Why would I defend him if I see him as one?

First of all, that doesn't have anything to do with the topic at hand here. Second, I would have to know what you think "statism" means in order to answer that question. I could refer to Merriam-Webster for it:

for it but I suspect you aspire to something more sinister.

Except for President Lawnchair, who history will remember as the most conservative president to serve up to this point in time. Do i even need to bother asking you to try to come up with a reason for why a Socialist president would ever authorize lobbing more missiles into Iraq, to clean up the mess created by a previous Conservative president?

Like any other conservative, President Lawnchair was saying what his owners were telling him to say. You aren't doing even a marginal job of discrediting my statement of Obama being the most conservative president to date in our country.

What you are applying here is circular reasoning. You are claiming that policies signed by Obama are socialist because you falsely believe Obama to be a Socialist. You are not discussing empirical results, rather you are discussing your own distorted view of reality.

As I have already stated, you cannot show me a conservative president who has ever served who would not have signed the HIIBA 2010 act into law. If you want to pretend that we haven't had a conservative president, then I give you the same question - why - that I gave to MH42.

So you're saying that low wage workers are somehow punished by getting raises? Interesting argument. I would be interested in knowing how you fantasize about supporting such an argument, but I don't expect that you will fill us in on that. Being as low wage workers' salaries are often a very trivial part of the cost of the goods and services they provide, the "raising their wages will horrifically raise the cost of all goods" argument doesn't hold water.

It is further noted that nothing you wrote was in any meaningful way connected to what you quoted me as saying

I wonder what your answer would have been if you had actually read the question.

The particular contradiction here is that you have unleashed a new de novo model of socialism where you are claiming it to be all about oppression. Last time you claimed it was all about giving away money for nothing. Those two are incompatible.

Of course as you prefer to be maximally ignorant on the topic I would expect no less.

How many consecutive journal entries will you dedicate to me this time? Here I thought you would tire of openly falling on your face, but if it makes you happy, go for it!

What would it take to get you to stop moving the goal posts? You've now moved them so much that you are contradicting your own earlier statements. For some reason, that doesn't seem to bother you.

You don't seem bothered in the least by how this blatantly contradicts your earlier assertions about socialism. Perhaps this is why you proudly and intentionally remain ignorant on the topic, to comfort yourself when you say such things.

You've shown you can be a hypocrite just fine on your own... Here I will remind you that one of your favorite memes on President Lawnchair (which notably contradicts your favorite sill hashtag) actually contradicts this part of your conspiracy theory.

No. He was elected to be president, as a liberal democrat. He is arguably the latter but inarguably a failure at the former.

So you admit then that he is not a socialist? If the "mask has slipped" that indicates you see that he is not fulfilling his promises (a statement I would agree with).

There is nothing desperate or fanatical about evaluating events that have actually happened for what they actually are.

The Lawnchair Administration has not proven anything - in any direction - about socialism. Nor has any other politician elected to federal office in this country in its history.

Obama has extended the conservative values of regressive taxation, build-up of the military and military-industrial complex, support of the largest and most profitable of industries, suppression of individual economic mobility, and suppression of workers' rights even more so than the previous conservative highwater marks that were left by Reagan, Bush, Bush, Nixon, and others. There has never been a president who was more conservative in those actions, and those are the actions he will be remembered for when the history books are written.

Your attempt to reach for an eleventh-inning redefining of "conservatism" in spite of many decades of tradition is not logical.