>    The Internet's about empowering US, not empowering some twits to make
>    money off us.  Let's keep that in mind.

If you DO keep that in mind, you have to be very careful about drawing the
dividing line in between the "twits" and "us."  Most of your tirade would
not have applied to elab cause they didn't send out their message, however
annoying it and it's delivery methodology might have been, 2-10 times a day
to everyone, everywhere.


    This'd QUITE effectively destroy e-mail as a *personal* communications
    medium, making it useless for all purposes

It'd probably destroy the net as a whole, but it won't happen.  The
technology exists NOW to stop it (or most of it, anyway) at the inbound
ISPs.  Right now, everyone wants to get rich being an ISP, so there are many
ISPs that are a bit lax on restricting their customer's tendancies to abuse
the current properties of the net.  In time, however, I think the world will
divide into ISPs that you can trust not to originate spam, and ISPs that
specically allow spam to be originated, and charge for the privilige (but no
one accepts mail from them, anyway.)

BillW