Day 342: Spam

Its the internet's 30th birthday and although overall its been an amazing invention I find one aspect particularly irritating: SPAM. Unsolicited e-mail (and increasingly phone calls) are an unacceptable imposition on our time.  It should be illegal to phone or write to people without their prior consent.  I'm pretty sure that internet and telephone companies have the technical capacity to make too hard for the spam industry to survive.  The problem with these e-mails and calls is that they now cost practically nothing so it doesn't matter if only 1 person in 10 or 100 thousand actually answers.  You can reach 100s of millions of people at practically no cost.  If we had to give written consent by physical mail for any company to be able write to us it would kill a useless industry and save our postal system.  In the mean time I urge you all to never answer unsolicited e-mails or unknown phone calls nothing good ever comes from them.