Die, spammers! Die! . . . is how I used to feel. Then E-mail filtering improved, and I didn't get quite so much spam E-mail, or unsolicited commercial E-mail (UCE).

But then I got a blog.

The floodgates opened. I was awash in spam comments. Knee-deep, then drowning in a blue river of links to prescription drugs, adult entertainment, and online gambling. Then I ran out of water metaphors and was simply getting a rather large amount of spam. This was despite using a key-word filter and moderating comments as "spam."

That whole "death to spammers" idea was sounding pretty good again. I realized, however, that I had misplaced my anger. I found it in a coat pocket with a crumpled receipt, but I also realized I shouldn't hate the spammers. Spammers are lowlifes, yes, and deserve to be prosecuted. But they're just trying to make money. The real problem is that they are making money because enough idiots are buying things through spam. Scientific American (April 2005) estimated that  just with E-mail, a spammer could make money with a response rate of only one in 100,000 (0.001%).

They're the ones ruining it for the 99,999's of us. We must stop these spam sponsors before they kill again! Sorry, I was still thinking in death metaphors. I mean, we must stop these spam sponsors before they, indirectly but culpably, waste more of our time and increase our ISP and Web-host costs. But how?

Obviously, if people say that they bought things via spam, we can take away their computers. (And give the computers to charity; this isn't vigilantism.) It probably won't be quite that simple, but spam enablers have already proven their stupidity. With some, "Have you ever bought anything from spam?" should do it. With people who can, say, change their screensaver, try: "Hey, do you know any good online gambling sites? Oh, and by the way, how did you come across that link, Total Stranger on the Street?"

It won't be easy, but we must speed up the Internet by thinning the herd of the weaker gazelles, the ones slowing us down by, er, stopping to eat the lions' spam. And, uh, thus encouraging the lions to put out more spam, which, um, most of us don't eat. So the lions eat the spam eaters, which is actually good for us—except that eating spam makes them carnivore gazelles, and uh . . . .

Meanwhile, I'll work on that last metaphor. Oh, and for those who might be a different kind of stupid: Don't really take other people's computers.