I spent a long day working on Lab 4 today and making revisions to Labs 1, 2, and 3. The day started at 5:30 a.m. when my home office phone, which has an extension in the study next to the bedroom, began ringing. Turned out it was some #^$!#*&! moron spamming my fax machine. I turned auto-answer off on my fax, only to have the spammer try two more times. I couldn’t go back to sleep, so I got up and got to work.

As if e-mail spammers weren’t bad enough, now we have fax spammers. The frustrating thing is that telephone spam is legal in the state where I live as long as the spammer includes an opt-out phone number. As if we had time to call those numbers and opt out! The only thing I hate worse than spammers is politicians. They don’t have the backbone to make spamming illegal–in any form.

Last year I spammed my congressmen with e-mails lobbying for anti-spam legislation. Of course it did no good. The CAN-SPAM Act of 2003 arguably made the problem worse, not better. Want to know what it would take to get my vote for president? Two things:

1) Promise to nail Osama bin Laden.

2) Make spamming a capital offense.

George Bush and John Kerry, are you listening?