Another thought on the spam problem and Frequently Proposed Solutions in general: as a community we have become obsessed with ephemeral information. That is, we all sit in front of our terminals, read our email, (re-)invent new ideas, and spew them instantly across the world; these ideas are lost and forgotten in a week. The web does go some limited way towards creating archival information -- ideas that remain and can be used to inform later idea -- but it does not go far enough. Ultimately, the only way we can avoid regurgitating the same ideas over and over is to invest some of our effort in converting ephemeral information into truly archival information. This is a shift with some analogy to the shift of civilization that resulted from replacing conversations around the campfire with written words on tablets and in books. Creating competant and useful archival material is hard intellectual work, harder than sitting in front of our terminals, reading our email, (re-)inventing ... etc., but I believe it is the only real path to progress. In the Internet community, the RFC series of docuemnts has been perpetuated as an archival document series for this purpose. Bob Braden