A NASCAR fan faces up to a year in prison for flooding Fox Entertainment with more than a half-million e-mails because he was angry the network aired a Boston Red Sox game instead of an auto race.
Michael Melo of Billerica has agreed to plead guilty to a federal misdemeanor charge of damage to a protected computer system, his attorney said Wednesday. Melo designed a program that repeatedly sent the same six e-mails to Fox Entertainment Group Inc. in Los Angeles over a few days in late April and early May 2001. (entire story)
Allow me to speak for the entire local broadcasting industry: Attention television fans. GO THE FUCK AWAY. You do not pay us for the service we provide. You have a multitude of other options to guarantee you get the programming you want, in this case via Pay Per View's NASCAR channel. Your local affiliates are just doing what they can to make money and appease as many viewers as posible. 90% of your complaints can't even be addressed by your local affiliate, and the networks themselves are so laden with bureaucracy that they can never, ever respond to every crazy person's bitching.
Melo here is the worst kind of viewer. He thinks that television somehow owes him. Like it's his American right to get exactly what he wants on his television just because he pays a cable bill. And he still buys into the old High School Student Government Petition concept. "If we get 100 signatures, they'll have to listen!" Die.
What he's done is prove to stations that it's extremely easy for a single viewer to skew the ballot box. If he had been really smart, instead of just an above-average NASCAR fan, he would have engineered his program to make it look like the mail was coming from different addresses and different names. Also, he should probably have cut off the emails somewhere below the entire population count of Boston. (Which, in 1990, was around half a million.)
If only he had used his powers for good. He could have created the world's best NASCAR fantasy sport league. Or invented some new way to silk-screen car logos onto sweatpants. Or brought Dale Earnhardt back from the dead. Or selected a new, modern cartoon character to piss on numbers to replace Calvin. (Maybe the geeky kid from Foxtrot? Or Crash Bandicoot?) But instead he chose to send off a bunch of emails. Jackass.
UPDATE: Upon reflection, it occurs to me that he might not actually have created a "program" at all to do his mass-mailing; he could easily have just made an automated script in Outlook or something. This still would keep the title of America's Smartest NASCAR fan, though.
