Proposed: An Expansion of the Death Penalty

I like to consider myself a fairly compassionate and tolerant person. In fact, by most people's standards, I'm probably considered to be one of those pinko-commie dirty liberal types that are always talked about on the radio. I oppose capital punishment for murderers, rapists, and child molesters, but recently I have been made aware of a breed of humanity (I use the word generously) for which the death penalty is being shamefully underutilized: malicious computer programmers. Specifically, I am referring to those people who have decided (no doubt using some sort of twisted, sociopathic reasoning) that it is a good idea to create adware and spyware. These people, like the programs they create, are nothing but social viruses. They contribute absolutely nothing useful to society and as far as I am concerned, anybody who thinks that writing programs that covertly infiltrate my computer in order to provide me with unsolicited advertisements for online poker, penis enlargement, and (ironically) spyware/adware blocking software every two and half seconds have absolutely no right to breathe the same air that I do.

As such, I am proposing that two new criminal sentencing rules be mandated in all federal, state, and local courts:

1. All persons convicted of creating spyware/adware or conspiring to do so will be sentenced to death. There will be no appeals and the execution will only wait as long as it takes to power up the generators.

2. All employees of companies that have ever profited from adware/spyware-generated advertising will be expelled from U.S. soil and forced to live out the rest of their lives performing menial and pointless labor in Siberian Re-education camps. The only employees who will be spared this fate are those who report their company's illegal practices to the Board of Technological Terrorism (a soon to be created division of the DHS).

I think that any dispassionate observer (such as myself) should be able to see that these rules are both eminently reasonable and pragmatic. In this post-9/11 world in which we live, our country cannot afford to be weak on terrorism. And I ask you this - if spyware and adware are not terrorism, what is?

-Dave

ps. The above proposal has absolutely nothing to do with the fact that I spent over four hours last night unsuccessfully attempting to remove untold numbers of spyware/adware programs that managed to sneak their way onto my computer without my knowledge. Nothing at all.