Robin's "these things" was spam email in general; the "Norma Cole"
email is a sincere attempt to do something worthwhile using an
unsuitable technology in an unsuitable way.
I'm afraid I don't think much of the online petition either. I don't
think that typing one's name into a form element on a web page has the
illocutionary force even of adding one's written signature to a
written petition. I can write a Python script that will generate half
a million plausible-sounding names and submit them to a web form at
the rate of a hundreds a minute. They're not worth the paper they're
not written on.
Dominic
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