STOP SPAM NOW! Must Read - All newsgroup users need to rebe

[Nick Funk]

Please read.

Sorry about this off topic post. But anyone who has every posted to a
news group knows to well that they open themselves up to a flood of spam.

Since the recent National "Do-Not-Call" registry to stop telephone
solicitation, many telemarketers have found SPAM as another method of
solicitations to harass the public. In fact spam is less costly than
mass mailings, telephone banks of minimum wage employees and can be
implemented very easily from practically anywhere.

This problem will only worsen over time!

Why has our Congress ignored the spam issue? Could this be due to
political pressures from merchandiser's industry, from PAC committees,
trade associations, and possibly political funding from these groups.

I propose that ALL SPAM email you recieve is forwarded to your Senator
and Congressman.

Attached are two links to email addresses of our Senators and Congressman.

http://www.senate.gov/general/contact_information/senators_cfm.cfm
http://www.house.gov/house/MemberWWW.html

Please pass the message on!

 

[Don Pearce]

On Sat, 13 Sep 2003 09:12:09 -0500, Nick Funk
<nfunk@NOSPAM.rtconline.com> wrote:

Please read.

Sorry about this off topic post. But anyone who has every posted to a
news group knows to well that they open themselves up to a flood of spam.

Since the recent National "Do-Not-Call" registry to stop telephone
solicitation, many telemarketers have found SPAM as another method of
solicitations to harass the public. In fact spam is less costly than
mass mailings, telephone banks of minimum wage employees and can be
implemented very easily from practically anywhere.

This problem will only worsen over time!

Why has our Congress ignored the spam issue? Could this be due to
political pressures from merchandiser's industry, from PAC committees,
trade associations, and possibly political funding from these groups.

I propose that ALL SPAM email you recieve is forwarded to your Senator
and Congressman.

Attached are two links to email addresses of our Senators and Congressman.

http://www.senate.gov/general/contact_information/senators_cfm.cfm
http://www.house.gov/house/MemberWWW.html

Please pass the message on!

Not quite sure what to do here. Do I choose the one closest to England
or what?

There is a precedent - when Disney was making cartoons in LA, he
needed an English voice over for a butler. He asked his A&R man to go
and find the closest he could to an Englishman. The A&R man took this
literally in a geographical sense, and we now have a brilliant classic
English butler with a broad Brooklyn accent.

BTW, WTF do you suppose a congressman can do about it?

d

_____________________________

http://www.pearce.uk.com

 

[Ben Pope]

Don Pearce wrote:

BTW, WTF do you suppose a congressman can do about it?

Especially after the filter they have in place removes most of the junk
you've just sent him and then their secretary removes the rest.

If the secretary was sharp enough they'd report you to your ISP as well.

Ben
--
I'm not just a number. To many, I'm known as a String...

 

[Jim Thompson]

On Sat, 13 Sep 2003 09:12:09 -0500, Nick Funk
<nfunk@NOSPAM.rtconline.com> wrote:

Please read.

Sorry about this off topic post. But anyone who has every posted to a
news group knows to well that they open themselves up to a flood of spam.

Since the recent National "Do-Not-Call" registry to stop telephone
solicitation, many telemarketers have found SPAM as another method of
solicitations to harass the public. In fact spam is less costly than
mass mailings, telephone banks of minimum wage employees and can be
implemented very easily from practically anywhere.

This problem will only worsen over time!

Why has our Congress ignored the spam issue? Could this be due to
political pressures from merchandiser's industry, from PAC committees,
trade associations, and possibly political funding from these groups.

I propose that ALL SPAM email you recieve is forwarded to your Senator
and Congressman.

Attached are two links to email addresses of our Senators and Congressman.

http://www.senate.gov/general/contact_information/senators_cfm.cfm
http://www.house.gov/house/MemberWWW.html

Please pass the message on!

I used to be of a mind that spam legislation would help, but the more
I investigated the more I changed my mind. Here's what I recently
wrote to a legislator in Arizona who thinks he can write a good spam
bill:

Slade,

Your bill fits perfectly into a Pollyanna world. Unfortunately the
origin of most spam is obfuscated and the servers are located in
foreign countries. So your bill will do absolutely nothing.

A legal solution is just a waste of time, and will result in the
reduction of necessary freedom for all of us. LBJ as a senator
once said something to the effect:

"Don't think about the good a law can do if properly enforced;
rather think of the harm that could be caused if it is improperly
enforced."

(Pretty amazing statement, particularly from a Democrat.)

The Internet is gradually regulating itself by blocking/black-listing
ISPs that allow spam to originate from their sites.

However, if you must write a law:

OPT-IN NOT OPT-OUT. OPT-OUT just lets the spammer know that your
E-mail address is legitimate, so he sells it to others. If a spammer
claims you chose Opt-In, the spammer must prove it by producing
documentation. Falsifying documentation should be death by flogging.
(You improperly state "...closely mirrors California Bill #12". The
California bill requires OPT-IN.) Take the definition of OPT-IN from
http://cspotrun.org/monste1.pdf so that a sender can't claim you opted
in if you simply failed to un-check a box or the opting-in is hidden
in a privacy policy. You must take specific affirmative action in
order for the sender to claim you opted in. Nothing but confirmed
opt-in allowed, EVEN for politicians (particularly) and charities and
religio/socio/political organizations. A good example of OPT-IN is
the newsletter from Intel, the bottom of the newsletter reminds you
when and where you signed up, and how to get off of the list.

Hold Advertiser Responsible as well as Sender.

Private Right of Action (with a junk-fax-like penalty of $500/$1500 as
appropriate). Victims may sue in civil court for trespass to chattel
and theft of resources. May sue for punitive and actual damages. Any
recipient of spam shall be considered a "victim" (not necessary to be
an ISP). In other words an end user can sue for punitive damages.

All traffic exiting any ISP, with facilities in Arizona, must leave
with a valid source address.

License ISPs (cheaply, to allow small businesses to survive),
requiring the license to operate. License pullable for spam offenses.
Regulation maybe through Corporation Commission, treatment like a
utility or common carrier.

Rewards for turning in illegal work-at-home spammers.

BIG fines are what's necessary here, or some jail time if possible.

Make it a felony instead of a misdemeanor.
Protect the ISP from litigation for throwing off a spammer.
Burn the ISP for harboring a spammer.

Forged "From:" address should be separately prosecutable as fraud.

Prosecuting fraudulent advertising under existing statutes would
eliminate a lot of the problems.

No ISP shall accept, or deliver, any E-mail without verifying that it
originated from a valid IP address. Every E-mail must have a
legitimate return address, openly traceable to the originator.

No ISP shall deliver pornographic E-mail or E-mail advertising
pornography; and shall be subject to fines or lose of license if they
do. Any ISP that claims they can't do that is lying through their
teeth. It's a technical filtering issue done right now by many ISPs.
By switching my E-mail routing so that my incoming E-mail goes through
an ISP that employs filtering and black-listing before getting to
Cox.net reduced my spam by more than an order of magnitude. Any
Arizona ISP should be free to use whatever means they want to filter
E-mails, but they should INFORM their customers what is in use to give
the customer informed choice of whether to stay.

Any ISP, in Arizona or foreign (outside Arizona), that refuses to shut
down spammers shall be subject to blocking/black-listing by all other
Arizona ISPs.

"ADV:" in Subject Field is just plain laughable! Only legitimate
businesses will do it, and they're not a problem right now...
legitimate businesses never want to offend potential customers, and
always honor "remove" requests. Maybe make senders of "ADV:" subject
to a 10 cent tax for each item E-mailed? Ha! Ha!

"ADV:" also has the adverse effect of legitimizing spamming.



...Jim Thompson
--
| James E.Thompson, P.E. | mens |
| Analog Innovations, Inc. | et |
| Analog/Mixed-Signal ASIC's and Discrete Systems | manus |
| Phoenix, Arizona Voice480)460-2350 | |
| E-mail Address at Website Fax480)460-2142 | Brass Rat |
| http://www.analog-innovations.com | 1962 |

I love to cook with wine. Sometimes I even put it in the food.

 

[J-Dawg]

REDMOND, Wash, Sept. 11 (UPI) -- A Redmond, Wash., man has won a record
$250,000 judgment against two Ohioans who flooded his e-mail box with 58,000
pieces of spam.

The Seattle-Post Intelligencer said Nigel Featherston spent $10,000 to hire
an attorney and a private investigator in his quest against Dayton, Ohio,
residents Linda Lightfoot and Charles Childs and their varied corporate
personas: Universal Direct, Mega Direct, Mega Success and Ultra Trim 2002.

The Washington state law, which was passed in 1998, fines spammers $500 for
each unsolicited e-mail they send. That means the Ohio couple could have
been held liable for $29 million.

But Featherston, a former Microsoft programmer, told the Post-Intelligencer
he knew collecting that amount would be too difficult.

--

Copyright 2003 by United Press International.

All rights reserved.

 

[Ben Pope]

Jim Thompson wrote:

A legal solution is just a waste of time, and will result in the
reduction of necessary freedom for all of us. LBJ as a senator
once said something to the effect:

"Don't think about the good a law can do if properly enforced;
rather think of the harm that could be caused if it is improperly
enforced."

(Pretty amazing statement, particularly from a Democrat.)

There is no point in an unenforced law. Some legislation was passed here
(UK) that made obtaining guns harder - even for government bodies that
required them. What was the point in that? The poeple with guns have them
illegally anyway - they clearly have no regard for the law so the net result
was that it is now harder to deal with the armed criminals. Brilliant.

The Internet is gradually regulating itself by blocking/black-listing
ISPs that allow spam to originate from their sites.

IF you use certain types of filtering software.

However, if you must write a law:

OPT-IN NOT OPT-OUT. OPT-OUT just lets the spammer know that your
E-mail address is legitimate, so he sells it to others. If a spammer
claims you chose Opt-In, the spammer must prove it by producing
documentation. Falsifying documentation should be death by flogging.
(You improperly state "...closely mirrors California Bill #12". The
California bill requires OPT-IN.) Take the definition of OPT-IN from
http://cspotrun.org/monste1.pdf so that a sender can't claim you opted
in if you simply failed to un-check a box or the opting-in is hidden
in a privacy policy. You must take specific affirmative action in
order for the sender to claim you opted in. Nothing but confirmed
opt-in allowed, EVEN for politicians (particularly) and charities and
religio/socio/political organizations. A good example of OPT-IN is
the newsletter from Intel, the bottom of the newsletter reminds you
when and where you signed up, and how to get off of the list.

Indeed, absolutely no point in OPT-OUT.

Hold Advertiser Responsible as well as Sender.

This is difficult to pin down. It's hard to make somebody else responsible
for anothers actions unless they are an employee. This would not
necesasrily be the case, even if the sender was paid to send the mails.

License ISPs (cheaply, to allow small businesses to survive),
requiring the license to operate. License pullable for spam offenses.
Regulation maybe through Corporation Commission, treatment like a
utility or common carrier.

Good.

Forged "From:" address should be separately prosecutable as fraud.

Now we're getting somewhere. There is a reason for the "Reply-To" Field.

Prosecuting fraudulent advertising under existing statutes would
eliminate a lot of the problems.

Quite possibly.

No ISP shall accept, or deliver, any E-mail without verifying that it
originated from a valid IP address. Every E-mail must have a
legitimate return address, openly traceable to the originator.

This is ok, provided decent logs are kept of non-static IP adresses.

No ISP shall deliver pornographic E-mail or E-mail advertising
pornography; and shall be subject to fines or lose of license if they
do.

Why porn? Anything illegal... maybe, but drawing lines is usually hard..

Any ISP that claims they can't do that is lying through their
teeth. It's a technical filtering issue done right now by many ISPs.

Always the problem of false negs/positives.

"ADV:" in Subject Field is just plain laughable! Only legitimate
businesses will do it, and they're not a problem right now...
legitimate businesses never want to offend potential customers, and
always honor "remove" requests. Maybe make senders of "ADV:" subject
to a 10 cent tax for each item E-mailed? Ha! Ha!

"ADV:" also has the adverse effect of legitimizing spamming.

Agreed... you get it all the time. "ADV:", "ADV :", "ADVERT:", "ADV3RT:"
it's the sort of thing they use to get around the filters but attempting to
appear "honest".

Some very good points, not all of which are entirely practical,
unfortunately.

I think the only way to get around the problem is to change the way we do
email from a technical standpoint.

SPAM is SPAM - it's cheap. If it means using a computer located in a
country without the appropriate laws to send it, they'll do that.
Legislation cannot realistically solve the problem.

Ben
--
I'm not just a number. To many, I'm known as a String...

 

[J. A. Mc.]

On Sat, 13 Sep 2003 08:19:09 -0700, Jim Thompson
<Jim-T@golana-will-get-you.com> found these unused words floating
about:

On Sat, 13 Sep 2003 09:12:09 -0500, Nick Funk
nfunk@NOSPAM.rtconline.com> wrote:


Please read.

Sorry about this off topic post. But anyone who has every posted to a
news group knows to well that they open themselves up to a flood of spam.

Since the recent National "Do-Not-Call" registry to stop telephone
solicitation, many telemarketers have found SPAM as another method of
solicitations to harass the public. In fact spam is less costly than
mass mailings, telephone banks of minimum wage employees and can be
implemented very easily from practically anywhere.

This problem will only worsen over time!

Why has our Congress ignored the spam issue? Could this be due to
political pressures from merchandiser's industry, from PAC committees,
trade associations, and possibly political funding from these groups.

I propose that ALL SPAM email you recieve is forwarded to your Senator
and Congressman.

Attached are two links to email addresses of our Senators and Congressman.

http://www.senate.gov/general/contact_information/senators_cfm.cfm
http://www.house.gov/house/MemberWWW.html

Please pass the message on!

I used to be of a mind that spam legislation would help, but the more
I investigated the more I changed my mind. Here's what I recently
wrote to a legislator in Arizona who thinks he can write a good spam
bill:

Slade,

Your bill fits perfectly into a Pollyanna world. Unfortunately the
origin of most spam is obfuscated and the servers are located in
foreign countries. So your bill will do absolutely nothing.

A legal solution is just a waste of time, and will result in the
reduction of necessary freedom for all of us. LBJ as a senator
once said something to the effect:

"Don't think about the good a law can do if properly enforced;
rather think of the harm that could be caused if it is improperly
enforced."

(Pretty amazing statement, particularly from a Democrat.)

The Internet is gradually regulating itself by blocking/black-listing
ISPs that allow spam to originate from their sites.

However, if you must write a law:

OPT-IN NOT OPT-OUT. OPT-OUT just lets the spammer know that your
E-mail address is legitimate, so he sells it to others. If a spammer
claims you chose Opt-In, the spammer must prove it by producing
documentation. Falsifying documentation should be death by flogging.
(You improperly state "...closely mirrors California Bill #12". The
California bill requires OPT-IN.) Take the definition of OPT-IN from
http://cspotrun.org/monste1.pdf so that a sender can't claim you opted
in if you simply failed to un-check a box or the opting-in is hidden
in a privacy policy. You must take specific affirmative action in
order for the sender to claim you opted in. Nothing but confirmed
opt-in allowed, EVEN for politicians (particularly) and charities and
religio/socio/political organizations. A good example of OPT-IN is
the newsletter from Intel, the bottom of the newsletter reminds you
when and where you signed up, and how to get off of the list.

Hold Advertiser Responsible as well as Sender.

Most GOOD advertisers will take action against their 'affiliate' IF
you forward the SPAM.

Private Right of Action (with a junk-fax-like penalty of $500/$1500 as
appropriate). Victims may sue in civil court for trespass to chattel
and theft of resources. May sue for punitive and actual damages. Any
recipient of spam shall be considered a "victim" (not necessary to be
an ISP). In other words an end user can sue for punitive damages.

Proven to be ineffective - how many junk faxes have YOU collected on?

All traffic exiting any ISP, with facilities in Arizona, must leave
with a valid source address.

Already exists, even if not normally understandable by the average
user. If you require 'valid' nyms for posting, then all you do is to
provide SPAMmers, willing to 'bend' the law, a fresh source of maioing
addys.

License ISPs (cheaply, to allow small businesses to survive),
requiring the license to operate. License pullable for spam offenses.
Regulation maybe through Corporation Commission, treatment like a
utility or common carrier.

All already have business licenses - are you proposing to now regulate
the internet? If that's the case, why not just go to a fully moderated
system ... Big Brother will read all and send on what is appropriate.

NUTZ!

Rewards for turning in illegal work-at-home spammers.

BIG fines are what's necessary here, or some jail time if possible.

Make it a felony instead of a misdemeanor.
Protect the ISP from litigation for throwing off a spammer.

That's a sane idea!

Burn the ISP for harboring a spammer.

Invasion of privacy - you're demanding that the ISP become Judge/Jury.
A simple copy of a SPAMming 'conviction' sent to the ISP (under the
above great idea) would get them thrown off.

Forged "From:" address should be separately prosecutable as fraud.

Gee, next you'll reguire SSN's and DL's on every message ... hard mail
or e-mail! Read the constitution.

Prosecuting fraudulent advertising under existing statutes would
eliminate a lot of the problems.

2nd SANE idea - unlikely as most officialdom doesn't care.

No ISP shall accept, or deliver, any E-mail without verifying that it
originated from a valid IP address. Every E-mail must have a
legitimate return address, openly traceable to the originator.

Same as above - only feeds valid addys to the SPAMmer as your email
addy is used for posting too. (Gee ... is your's valid? <G&gt

No ISP shall deliver pornographic E-mail or E-mail advertising
pornography; and shall be subject to fines or lose of license if they
do. Any ISP that claims they can't do that is lying through their
teeth. It's a technical filtering issue done right now by many ISPs.
By switching my E-mail routing so that my incoming E-mail goes through
an ISP that employs filtering and black-listing before getting to
Cox.net reduced my spam by more than an order of magnitude. Any
Arizona ISP should be free to use whatever means they want to filter
E-mails, but they should INFORM their customers what is in use to give
the customer informed choice of whether to stay.

Rquires invasion of transmission - read constitution.

Any ISP, in Arizona or foreign (outside Arizona), that refuses to shut
down spammers shall be subject to blocking/black-listing by all other
Arizona ISPs.

Already available - and done!

"ADV:" in Subject Field is just plain laughable! Only legitimate
businesses will do it, and they're not a problem right now...
legitimate businesses never want to offend potential customers, and
always honor "remove" requests. Maybe make senders of "ADV:" subject
to a 10 cent tax for each item E-mailed? Ha! Ha!

"ADV:" also has the adverse effect of legitimizing spamming.



...Jim Thompson

Easy way, have a sending and posing box that just gets trashed. Your
personal email is included 'in code' for the proper recipient to hand
'reply'.

When you want the guv'mint to DO for you, expect to be DONE!

 

[J. A. Mc.]

On Sat, 13 Sep 2003 15:37:18 GMT, "J-Dawg" <jjith@cox.net> found these
unused words floating about:

REDMOND, Wash, Sept. 11 (UPI) -- A Redmond, Wash., man has won a record
$250,000 judgment against two Ohioans who flooded his e-mail box with 58,000
pieces of spam.

The Seattle-Post Intelligencer said Nigel Featherston spent $10,000 to hire
an attorney and a private investigator in his quest against Dayton, Ohio,
residents Linda Lightfoot and Charles Childs and their varied corporate
personas: Universal Direct, Mega Direct, Mega Success and Ultra Trim 2002.

The Washington state law, which was passed in 1998, fines spammers $500 for
each unsolicited e-mail they send. That means the Ohio couple could have
been held liable for $29 million.

But Featherston, a former Microsoft programmer, told the Post-Intelligencer
he knew collecting that amount would be too difficult.

Hint ... this is OT and SPAM, itself!

 

[Ben Pope]

J. A. Mc. wrote:

Same as above - only feeds valid addys to the SPAMmer as your email
addy is used for posting too. (Gee ... is your's valid? <G&gt

Of course his isn't valid... but we are assuming a working system here...
where we have no spammers 'cos it's too expensive for them. We don't quite
have that yet.

Ben
--
I'm not just a number. To many, I'm known as a String...

 

[Jim Thompson]

On Sat, 13 Sep 2003 09:53:52 -0700, J. A. Mc. <jaSPAMc@gbr.online.com>
wrote:

[snip]

When you want the guv'mint to DO for you, expect to be DONE!

That's why my first suggestion to Senator Slade Mead was DON'T BOTHER.

I am exceedingly happy with the works of SpamCop and SPEWS used by my
website ISP; and Spamnix finishes off the one-every-other-day spam
that get through.

...Jim Thompson
--
| James E.Thompson, P.E. | mens |
| Analog Innovations, Inc. | et |
| Analog/Mixed-Signal ASIC's and Discrete Systems | manus |
| Phoenix, Arizona Voice480)460-2350 | |
| E-mail Address at Website Fax480)460-2142 | Brass Rat |
| http://www.analog-innovations.com | 1962 |

I love to cook with wine. Sometimes I even put it in the food.

 

[Jim Thompson]

On Sat, 13 Sep 2003 09:57:34 -0700, J. A. Mc. <jaSPAMc@gbr.online.com>
wrote:

On Sat, 13 Sep 2003 15:37:18 GMT, "J-Dawg" <jjith@cox.net> found these
unused words floating about:

REDMOND, Wash, Sept. 11 (UPI) -- A Redmond, Wash., man has won a record
$250,000 judgment against two Ohioans who flooded his e-mail box with 58,000
pieces of spam.

The Seattle-Post Intelligencer said Nigel Featherston spent $10,000 to hire
an attorney and a private investigator in his quest against Dayton, Ohio,
residents Linda Lightfoot and Charles Childs and their varied corporate
personas: Universal Direct, Mega Direct, Mega Success and Ultra Trim 2002.

The Washington state law, which was passed in 1998, fines spammers $500 for
each unsolicited e-mail they send. That means the Ohio couple could have
been held liable for $29 million.

But Featherston, a former Microsoft programmer, told the Post-Intelligencer
he knew collecting that amount would be too difficult.

Hint ... this is OT and SPAM, itself!

And what has "J. A. Mc." contributed to this group? Nothing but
bitching about his definition of "OT and SPAM". Go away!

...Jim Thompson
--
| James E.Thompson, P.E. | mens |
| Analog Innovations, Inc. | et |
| Analog/Mixed-Signal ASIC's and Discrete Systems | manus |
| Phoenix, Arizona Voice480)460-2350 | |
| E-mail Address at Website Fax480)460-2142 | Brass Rat |
| http://www.analog-innovations.com | 1962 |

I love to cook with wine. Sometimes I even put it in the food.

 

[J-Dawg]

There is no point in an unenforced law. Some legislation was passed here

(UK) that made obtaining guns harder - even for government bodies that
required them. What was the point in that? The poeple with guns have
them
illegally anyway - they clearly have no regard for the law so the net
result
was that it is now harder to deal with the armed criminals. Brilliant.

Oh and just to go off on another tangent, I think that most guns laws suck.
Just do a google search for Virgin Utah and you will find a city with a
mandatory gun law. Crime is lower there than any city in the US of
proportionate size. The same goes for Kennesaw, Georgia; the city that's
Virgin's law was modeled after. Hehehe, this is going to cause some debate
hopefully.

 

[Bill Sloman]

"Ben Pope" <spam@hotmail.com> wrote in message news:<bjvhhg$nqrk8$1@ID-191149.news.uni-berlin.de>...

Jim Thompson wrote:

<snip>

There is no point in an unenforced law. Some legislation was passed here
(UK) that made obtaining guns harder - even for government bodies that
required them. What was the point in that? The people with guns have them
illegally anyway - they clearly have no regard for the law so the net result
was that it is now harder to deal with the armed criminals. Brilliant.

A depressing example of non-quantitative thinking.

Those few people who manage to beat the legislation to get guns and
hold them illegally are a problem, but the legislation does make it
more difficult, and thus there are fewer of them.

The police thus have less occasion to send out squads of marksmen, and
need fewer guns themselves.

Seems to be a successful piece of legislation to me. It isn't
absolutely successful - it doesn't totally stop bad people from
getting guns if they tried hard enough - but absolutely successful
pieces of legislation are rare outside of cloud-cuckoo-land.

How many other laws are you going to campaign against, on the basis
that they don't totally stop the undesired behaviour condemned?
Anti-speeding, anti-fraud, anti-burglary, anti-corruption,
anti-assault, anti-murder - if you are going to be consistent, you
must want to throw out all of them, becasue all these crimes persist
despite vigorously enforced laws against them.

Perhaps you might care to restate your argument in terms that might
convince somebody with a functional critical faculty?

------
Bill Sloman, Nijmegen

 

[J-Dawg]

"Bill Sloman" <bill.sloman@ieee.org> wrote in message
news:7c584d27.0309131330.64738002@posting.google.com...

"Ben Pope" <spam@hotmail.com> wrote in message
news:<bjvhhg$nqrk8$1@ID-191149.news.uni-berlin.de>...
Jim Thompson wrote:

snip

There is no point in an unenforced law. Some legislation was passed
here
(UK) that made obtaining guns harder - even for government bodies that
required them. What was the point in that? The people with guns have
them
illegally anyway - they clearly have no regard for the law so the net
result
was that it is now harder to deal with the armed criminals. Brilliant.

A depressing example of non-quantitative thinking.

Those few people who manage to beat the legislation to get guns and
hold them illegally are a problem, but the legislation does make it
more difficult, and thus there are fewer of them.

The police thus have less occasion to send out squads of marksmen, and
need fewer guns themselves.

Seems to be a successful piece of legislation to me. It isn't
absolutely successful - it doesn't totally stop bad people from
getting guns if they tried hard enough - but absolutely successful
pieces of legislation are rare outside of cloud-cuckoo-land.

Not half as successful as what they did in Virgin Utah

How many other laws are you going to campaign against, on the basis
that they don't totally stop the undesired behaviour condemned?
Anti-speeding, anti-fraud, anti-burglary, anti-corruption,
anti-assault, anti-murder - if you are going to be consistent, you
must want to throw out all of them, becasue all these crimes persist
despite vigorously enforced laws against them.

Are you saying to fight a battle on one level, that you also have to fight
it on all levels? Do do so would stretch resources so thin that it would
become futile.

Perhaps you might care to restate your argument in terms that might
convince somebody with a functional critical faculty?

You aren't talking about yourself are you?

------
Bill Sloman, Nijmegen

 

[Fred Bloggs]

Bill Sloman wrote:

Perhaps you might care to restate your argument in terms that might
convince somebody with a functional critical faculty?

LOL- and are fewer people committing suicide because it's against the law?

 

[Roger Hamlett]

"Bill Sloman" <bill.sloman@ieee.org> wrote in message
news:7c584d27.0309131330.64738002@posting.google.com...

"Ben Pope" <spam@hotmail.com> wrote in message
news:<bjvhhg$nqrk8$1@ID-191149.news.uni-berlin.de>...
Jim Thompson wrote:

snip

There is no point in an unenforced law. Some legislation was passed
here
(UK) that made obtaining guns harder - even for government bodies that
required them. What was the point in that? The people with guns have
them
illegally anyway - they clearly have no regard for the law so the net
result
was that it is now harder to deal with the armed criminals. Brilliant.

A depressing example of non-quantitative thinking.

Those few people who manage to beat the legislation to get guns and
hold them illegally are a problem, but the legislation does make it
more difficult, and thus there are fewer of them.
Wrong.

Unfortunately, there is a bit pf 'historical behaviour', that affects this.
A suprising number of people have guns, often without knowing it. Things
like the old revolver/luger 'dad/grandad' brought home from the war. Some of
these get found, and handed in during 'amnesties' (why can't these be
permanent?), but a lot are found by people who think they should be able to
get something for them. In the past, they would go to firearms dealers, who
would usually buy them for a small amount of money, and then 'legitimise'
them, putting them onto their registers, and selling them, or deactivating
them. This doesn't now happen (the dealers who are left, by and large,
cannot handle handguns), so instead most of these are appearing in pubs or
similar places for sale. The fact that the law now bans handguns, makes them
have a certain 'social cachet', amongst particular groups, and the level of
armed crime in some places (London especially), has soared...

The police thus have less occasion to send out squads of marksmen, and
need fewer guns themselves.
This disagrees with the police figures.

Seems to be a successful piece of legislation to me. It isn't
absolutely successful - it doesn't totally stop bad people from
getting guns if they tried hard enough - but absolutely successful
pieces of legislation are rare outside of cloud-cuckoo-land.
Unfortunately, it is not 'hard' to either get or make a gun. It is perhaps

well worth realising that the original gun pioneers made in some cases
superb weapons, using tooling that by modern standard, is crude, and exists
now in millions of small machine shops. If a machinist, can't produce a
device to fire a bullet (the classic 'saturday night special'), in less than
fifteen minutes, then he/she should be fired!. A genuine repeater, is a lot
harder, but with a reasonable machine shop, can be made with a few weeks
work. Once one has been made, all the jigs and tooling (especially if CNC
systems are used), allow this to be repeated rapidly, and terrifyingly
easily. Sourcing across the channel, is even easier...
The hardest part to make, is rifling, but for short range weapons this has
little effect (it is still possible to group under 4" at 25yards, with a
'smoothbore' weapon). Even rifling can be made fairly easily with a
hydraulic 'pull' ram, and a tungsten carbide 'slug'.

How many other laws are you going to campaign against, on the basis
that they don't totally stop the undesired behaviour condemned?
Anti-speeding, anti-fraud, anti-burglary, anti-corruption,
anti-assault, anti-murder - if you are going to be consistent, you
must want to throw out all of them, becasue all these crimes persist
despite vigorously enforced laws against them.

Perhaps you might care to restate your argument in terms that might
convince somebody with a functional critical faculty?
The 'balance', was whether this law, would discourage a single criminal from

holding arms. It is perhaps worth realising that it was allready illegal to
have a firearm 'out' in a public place, before this law was introduced.
Criminals generally didn't get their arms from legitimate sources, but were
happy to get them 'illegally' - they are after all 'criminals'. The law cost
the state (the taxpayer), enough money to pay for two major new hospitals,
and by the police figures, has not reduced armed crime at all. The specific
question, is whether it can/will prevent another 'Dunblaine'. Though
(thankfully), there has not yet been a repeat of this horror, these events
are rare enough, that it'll be twenty years or more, before a conclusion on
this can be reached. However there have been enough 'near misses', with
people using even worse weapons (full auto rifles, that have been banned
even longer - since Hungerford), that there is little doubt that it has not
had the effect of making weapons harder to get for the criminal...

Best Wishes

 

[R. Steve Walz]

Jim Thompson wrote:

On Sat, 13 Sep 2003 09:12:09 -0500, Nick Funk
nfunk@NOSPAM.rtconline.com> wrote:
[]
Why has our Congress ignored the spam issue? Could this be due to
political pressures from merchandiser's industry, from PAC committees,
trade associations, and possibly political funding from these groups.

I propose that ALL SPAM email you recieve is forwarded to your Senator
and Congressman.

Attached are two links to email addresses of our Senators and Congressman.

http://www.senate.gov/general/contact_information/senators_cfm.cfm
http://www.house.gov/house/MemberWWW.html

Please pass the message on!

I used to be of a mind that spam legislation would help, but the more
I investigated the more I changed my mind. Here's what I recently
wrote to a legislator in Arizona who thinks he can write a good spam
bill:

Your bill fits perfectly into a Pollyanna world. Unfortunately the
origin of most spam is obfuscated and the servers are located in
foreign countries. So your bill will do absolutely nothing.
------------------------------

It is entirely do-able to destroy all foreign contact with any ISP
which will not fall into line and stop spam eminating from its domain.
Assembling and examining all packets before they are resent into the USA
at our borders lately is trivial.

Further it is even easier to send UNBELIEVABLE volumes of our own
punishment SPAM to any foreign ISP and also stop cooperating with any
nation that won't stop it, and cut off telecom and trade to and
from them.

You don't have to clog the courts with this shit or anything like
Opt-In requires, and it ends it by govt mandating that for all ports
of entry for telephonic data into the USA.

For the few spammers that try it in the USA, make it punishable by
the death penalty, just as we should ALL virus writers/disseminators.

This would stop all this bullshit. We don't have to listen to people
cutting in on our telephone conversations, so why should we have to
receive ANY kind of this telephonic terrorism!????!!

Opt-In is fine for junk snail-mail, but punish the perp with death.
-Steve
--
-Steve Walz rstevew@armory.com ftp://ftp.armory.com/pub/user/rstevew
Electronics Site!! 1000's of Files and Dirs!! With Schematics Galore!!
http://www.armory.com/~rstevew or http://www.armory.com/~rstevew/Public

 

[Kevin Aylward]

R. Steve Walz wrote:

For the few spammers that try it in the USA, make it punishable by
the death penalty, just as we should ALL virus writers/disseminators.

Nothing like good old RSW to expound a moderate approach.

Kevin Aylward
salesEXTRACT@anasoft.co.uk
http://www.anasoft.co.uk
SuperSpice, a very affordable Mixed-Mode
Windows Simulator with Schematic Capture,
Waveform Display, FFT's and Filter Design.

 

[Bill Sloman]

"Roger Hamlett" <rogerspamignored@ttelmah.demon.co.uk> wrote in message news:<O6X8b.815$rX6.143553@newsfep2-gui.server.ntli.net>...

"Bill Sloman" <bill.sloman@ieee.org> wrote in message
news:7c584d27.0309131330.64738002@posting.google.com...
"Ben Pope" <spam@hotmail.com> wrote in message
news:<bjvhhg$nqrk8$1@ID-191149.news.uni-berlin.de>...
Jim Thompson wrote:

snip

There is no point in an unenforced law. Some legislation was passed
here
(UK) that made obtaining guns harder - even for government bodies that
required them. What was the point in that? The people with guns have
them
illegally anyway - they clearly have no regard for the law so the net
result
was that it is now harder to deal with the armed criminals. Brilliant.

A depressing example of non-quantitative thinking.

Those few people who manage to beat the legislation to get guns and
hold them illegally are a problem, but the legislation does make it
more difficult, and thus there are fewer of them.

Wrong.

And the basis for this claim is?

Unfortunately, there is a bit pf 'historical behaviour', that affects this.
A suprising number of people have guns, often without knowing it. Things
like the old revolver/luger 'dad/grandad' brought home from the war. Some of
these get found, and handed in during 'amnesties' (why can't these be
permanent?), but a lot are found by people who think they should be able to
get something for them. In the past, they would go to firearms dealers, who
would usually buy them for a small amount of money, and then 'legitimise'
them, putting them onto their registers, and selling them, or deactivating
them. This doesn't now happen (the dealers who are left, by and large,
cannot handle handguns), so instead most of these are appearing in pubs or
similar places for sale. The fact that the law now bans handguns, makes them
have a certain 'social cachet', amongst particular groups, and the level of
armed crime in some places (London especially), has soared...

The police thus have less occasion to send out squads of marksmen, and
need fewer guns themselves.
This disagrees with the police figures.

And where are the police figures available?

Seems to be a successful piece of legislation to me. It isn't
absolutely successful - it doesn't totally stop bad people from
getting guns if they tried hard enough - but absolutely successful
pieces of legislation are rare outside of cloud-cuckoo-land.

Unfortunately, it is not 'hard' to either get or make a gun. It is perhaps
well worth realising that the original gun pioneers made in some cases
superb weapons, using tooling that by modern standard, is crude, and exists
now in millions of small machine shops. If a machinist, can't produce a
device to fire a bullet (the classic 'saturday night special'), in less than
fifteen minutes, then he/she should be fired!. A genuine repeater, is a lot
harder, but with a reasonable machine shop, can be made with a few weeks
work. Once one has been made, all the jigs and tooling (especially if CNC
systems are used), allow this to be repeated rapidly, and terrifyingly
easily.

And is this a significant source of illegal weapons?

Sourcing across the channel, is even easier...

The dismantling of the Soviet Union did seem to flood the market with
ex-military weapons. Tito distributed a lot of small arms around
Yugoslavia to discourage the Russians from thinking about an invasion
and - now that the Balkans are settling down a bit - these are also
showing up in the rest of Europe, not always in the hands of Balkan
hit-men.

<snip>

How many other laws are you going to campaign against, on the basis
that they don't totally stop the undesired behaviour condemned?
Anti-speeding, anti-fraud, anti-burglary, anti-corruption,
anti-assault, anti-murder - if you are going to be consistent, you
must want to throw out all of them, becasue all these crimes persist
despite vigorously enforced laws against them.

Perhaps you might care to restate your argument in terms that might
convince somebody with a functional critical faculty?

The 'balance', was whether this law, would discourage a single criminal from
holding arms. It is perhaps worth realising that it was already illegal to
have a firearm 'out' in a public place, before this law was introduced.
Criminals generally didn't get their arms from legitimate sources, but were
happy to get them 'illegally' - they are after all 'criminals'. The law cost
the state (the taxpayer), enough money to pay for two major new hospitals,
and by the police figures, has not reduced armed crime at all.

So where are the police figures available? And the comparison is not
between the number of armed crimes before and after the law was
enacted, but with the number of armed crimes that would have taken
place if the law had not been enacted.

The specific question, is whether it can/will prevent another 'Dunblaine'.
Though (thankfully), there has not yet been a repeat of this horror, these
events are rare enough, that it'll be twenty years or more, before a
conclusion on this can be reached.

However there have been enough 'near misses', with
people using even worse weapons (full auto rifles, that have been banned
even longer - since Hungerford), that there is little doubt that it has not
had the effect of making weapons harder to get for the criminal...

The problem with Dunblaine and similar atrocities is that they are
perpetrated by psychopathic lunatics, who may or may not be criminals
- crime is an appropriate career path for a psychopathic lunatic, but
they don't cooperate well with less deranged criminals who are in it
for money, and muderous psychopathic lunatics aren't representative of
the criminal population as a whole.

Any conclusion drawn on the basis of what potential Dunblaine
perpetrators have done has correspondingly little predictive value for
the behaviour of the profit-oriented bulk of the criminal population.

Perhaps you might care to restate your argument in terms that might
convince somebody with a functional critical faculty?

------
Bill Sloman, Nijmegen

 

[Ben Pope]

Bill Sloman wrote:

"Ben Pope" <spam@hotmail.com> wrote in message
news:<bjvhhg$nqrk8$1@ID-191149.news.uni-berlin.de>...
Jim Thompson wrote:

snip

There is no point in an unenforced law. Some legislation was passed
here (UK) that made obtaining guns harder - even for government
bodies that
required them. What was the point in that? The people with guns
have them
illegally anyway - they clearly have no regard for the law so the
net result
was that it is now harder to deal with the armed criminals.
Brilliant.

A depressing example of non-quantitative thinking.

So I presume you have all the numbers to hand and can prove what YOU are
saying?

Those few people who manage to beat the legislation to get guns and
hold them illegally are a problem, but the legislation does make it
more difficult, and thus there are fewer of them.

Speculative.

The police thus have less occasion to send out squads of marksmen, and
need fewer guns themselves.

Speculation carried forward.

Seems to be a successful piece of legislation to me. It isn't
absolutely successful - it doesn't totally stop bad people from
getting guns if they tried hard enough - but absolutely successful
pieces of legislation are rare outside of cloud-cuckoo-land.

How many other laws are you going to campaign against, on the basis
that they don't totally stop the undesired behaviour condemned?
Anti-speeding, anti-fraud, anti-burglary, anti-corruption,
anti-assault, anti-murder - if you are going to be consistent, you
must want to throw out all of them, becasue all these crimes persist
despite vigorously enforced laws against them.

Perhaps you might care to restate your argument in terms that might
convince somebody with a functional critical faculty?

You could have started by proving your side of the argument. Mine was based
on fact, although I do not have a source for the figures to hand. You're
argument is based on what?

Ben
--
I'm not just a number. To many, I'm known as a String...