If worms were made illegal, then distributed processing would essentially

be illegal. Technically, I guess multiprocessors and parallel processing

in general could fall into that category. How does a 4096-processor cray

T3E that dispatches thousands of identical processes differ from a

worm? If it's a matter of permission, the law already addresses that. The

fact is, people give their permission when they execute their e-mail. It's

as simple as that.

What someone should do is to file a class action against microsoft for negligence.

They have knowingly created and perpetuated a the environment without which

viruses would be rare and not very spectaculaar events. That in an of itself

would make the occurence even rarer

If a company makes a profit by selling millions of cars cheaply without disclosing

the cars were cosmetically repaired but structurally damaged vehicles that

resulted in various degrees of structral faiulure while being driven, the

corporation would find itself not only in a civil court, but most likely, the officers

of the corporation would be in a criminal court as well.

We don't need to break up microsoft, we need to make them accountable for

misrepresenting their products, like anyother company and take away the

ability to manipulate the legal system through copyright abuse. As an alternative

to breakup and an action that would go a long way to reducing the virus

probleem, I would suggest criminal charges be filed against bill gates and steve

ballmer at the very least. They make people like ivan boesky look like pikers.

Why should they be exempt from criminal conspiracy to commit fraud and several

billion counts of actual fraud? Even without RICO, they ought to do quite

a stretch. Any parole should be conditioned upon the same philosophy

used against kevin mitnick and proportionally imposed. The only difference

in that in kevin's case such restrictions are damaging to both kevin and the

people that could benefit from his experiences. Keeping bill gates and steve

ballmer from ever touching another computer is obviously a sagegaurd for

society and the only persons harmed would be harming society if no

restrictions were imposed.

The more likely one's curiosity is intended to be a criminal act, the less likely

the law is to consider the act anything but business. Curiosity for scientific

reasons is criminal; curiosity for monetary gain is a business that gets you

a patent for a novel criminal enterprise and an ipo.

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