When a few people started calling for the death penalty for spammers, my intial reaction was that it seemed extreme. But the more I’ve had to deal with spam, the more I’ve come around to that point of view. Spammers may not kill any one person, but considering the lost time they cost [...]

So if I buy the “Free 4X Life Printer” for which I’ve been getting spam lately, and print out my life at 4X, will it look any better than my life does at actual size?

In a discussion on Slashdot a few weeks, someone wrote:
Spam is a social problem, not primarily a technical one, and the solution is social.
No, it’s an economic problem, thus the solution is an economic one. As long as it costs essentially nothing for the spammer to blast out a hundred million email messages, he or [...]

The prevailing wisdom about spam recommending stock is that it is part of illegal pump-and-dump operations. It would be interesting to monitor such spam and the performance of the recommended stocks, and determining whether it’s possible to make money by taking the contrarian approach and selling those stocks short.
I’m not about to try it [...]