> it's a fundamental axiom of animal training that rewarding good behavior
> extremely quickly produces much more rapid change than punishing. See:
> "don't shoot the dog" by Karen Pryor. If we can give a legitimate
> outlet for e-mail advertising, a lot of the incentive to spam will be
> reduced. Those that remain can be punished through negative
> reinforcement techniques like connection grabbing and postage stamps.
This only works when having the dog behave good is the desirable
outcome. I would suggest that, with Stubberfield [*] for example, the
only desirable outcome is an "ex-dog" in Monty Python terminology ;-).
The only way to make Ralsky "behave" is to _promise_ to deliver what he
sends. Do we really want that? I don't think so.
those are wonderful examples. However, they aren't the people we're trying to
reach. They are the people we're trying to stop. I do get lots of "legitimate
advertising" that I am interested in sometimes. I just want to manage it
better. Those of the people we want to reach and I believe those of the people
we can influence. If we raise the various high enough, a bunch of the spammers
will go away. The truly hard-core ones will remain and can be targeted because
the field will be smaller and less noisy.