Obligatory old joke:

One day, at a U2 concert in (insert traditional butt of jokes for your area, I'll say Newfoundland,) Bono stops the music and starts clapping his hands, slowly, rhythmically.

As he gazes out over the crowd, still clapping slowly, he intones 'Every time *clap* I clap *clap* my hands, *clap* a child *clap* in Africa *clap* dies *clap* of starvation. *clap*'

From the audience comes up the outraged cry of 'Then stop fucking clapping, you idiot!'

Wrong answer, buddy.

I'd rather whine and demand even more government regulation of everything in life than switch to a competiter.

Picture, instead of Clippy, we could have Microsoft Creeper.

How apt....

Sure, it's not the most efficient codebase, but on a modern machine with power to spare, it's rather fine. Now, I have run it on a rather high end Core2Duo. That's less fun.

It should be the car that is disabled (or your license taken away)

Exactly - as they do already in the UK: get caught driving while using a mobile phone, you get 3 penalty points. That puts your insurance premiums up in itself, and if you reach a total of 12 points, no more driving for a few years. The penalty may be increased to 6 - in which case, get caught driving on the phone twice, you're in the passenger seat for several years. If someone's been caught driving on the phone (whether texting, talking or reading Slashdot), why let them continue driving at all? Will disabling the phone stop them driving while fiddling with the radio, eating, shaving etc? Of course not - so get them away from the wheel and let them text all they like as passengers.

It is against the law pretty much everywhere. However that law is enforced pretty much nowhere. It is just simply too difficult to enforce it, as a police officer has to catch the person in the act to even write a ticket. And then the ticket is so laughably small in terms of the monetary penalty as to be pointless to even write.

Here in the UK, the penalty is that you get one-quarter of the way to no longer driving (3 penalty points, where 12 means a driving ban); the government announced earlier this year they were considering doubling that to halfway, i.e. get caught doing it twice (within 3 years) and you won't be driving again. However small the risk, I suspect that's a big enough deterrent to scare many - particularly since it would often mean losing their job too. You don't have to be caught red-handed, either, just suspected enough for the police to investigate, then they check the network usage logs and confirm you were using the handset at the time in question. (Or get seen on a traffic camera, of which there are many.)

The idea in the article is just silly, though.

No - it isn't. That's funny. I did that pretty late at night.

All my personal sites got messed up and I had to fix them a week or two ago.

(b) it's an easy mental barrier between people venting at you, and, well, you (because they're not yelling at me, they're yelling at "Antonio".)

When your introductory training includes psychological coping mechanisms, rethink your decision to be there. :-)

So sure, it's easier to hang up on them but you are actually doing them a favor and helping them out by doing so.

No, failure to take hostile action isn't a favor; it's neutrality. Installing their malware would be a favor. I can appreciate those with the time and energy to take fight to this enemy (good on you!), but I have other battles to fight with my (however high) limited anger.

The problem with this enemy, which makes it so hard to care, is how irrelevant they are. So they call people about bullshit, wasting their time. That can be annoying, but there are so many more annoying things.

I suppose some people would say this enemy is worse that that, because the call is just a way of performing a SE attack, but I disagree. I just can't help but get blame-the-victim-y with SE attacks like that. I think many of our society's real problems are caused by SE, much of it legal (e.g. "vote for me, because I'm a member of the correct party," or "believe our religion's dogma, because your parents did") and that we'd all be a lot better off with more "scam antibodies" in ourselves. So part of me hopes these scammers flourish, thereby teaching people to stop being so fucking gullible. Maybe you can't fix stupid, but we can try, and an environment full of con artists is good for that. These assholes are evil, but they're good for us.

No, I'm not fully committed to that outlook (sure, I wanna hurt the bad guys too) but I'm conflicted enough that it evens out. And while we're at it, don't knock lazy! So a position of neutrality, it is.