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Spammer's Porsche Up For Grabs
gaurab writes "Anti-Spammers would love this. In this news piece, the BBC reports that AOL is putting up a Porsche it seized from a spammer last year in a sweepstakes. What next -- 'Spammer's House' in another sweepstakes? Is this the sign of things to come? From the story:
'Internet giant AOL has ratcheted up the war against unsolicited e-mail with a publicity-grabbing coup -- an online raffle of a spammer's seized Porsche. AOL won the car -- a $47,000 Boxster S -- as part of a court settlement against an unnamed e-mailer last year.'"
It says so right here:
. as px
Want to own seized property at half the cost? Want to buy a house for a fraction of the mortgage?
http://www.hillnews.com/news/043003/ss_auctions
Bah. Hey AOL, you REALLY want to help rid the world of spammers? ANSWER OUR EMAILS OF ABUSE.
Yo Grark
Canadian Bred with American Buttering
The publicity could work, but to be honest the first thing I thought was 'They got a million from sending email? I can send email!'
I've got just about enough morality not to go into spamming, but it sure it'd be an easy and very lucrative job for a geek that knows what they're doing. I wish I was more unscrupulous.
Come'on AOL, give those members who this guy spammed a chance to have at the car with a hammer! Better still offer them a chance to buy the oppertunity to urinate on the upholstery, proceeds to CAUCE! All sorts of fun activities spring to mind. You can the webcast it so the spammer can watch ;-)
Sweepstaking it is sooo tame.
"Oops, I always forget the purpose of competition is to divide people into winners and losers." - Hobbes
the amount of money spammers claim to earn in interviews, when saying something along the lines of 'antis are just jealous'
with
the amount of money spammers claim to earn in their filings with the IRS
It could be very informative.
Real Daleks don't climb stairs - they level the building.
I believe the whole point of the labour theory of value was to say that commodities aren't being exchanged at their true values (and screw all those horribly confusing use value/value distinctions), not that that makes the theory any easier to accept, since it's obvious that something of high utility that takes someone 1sec. to make is worth more than something completely useless that took years to finish. Marx is definitely very weird.
Quoting from the BBC article - "AOL says the Porsche has "symbolic value""
No shit !
ALL Porsches have symbolic value - that goes deeper than the badge.
If you ever get the chance to own a Porsche, especially an older model, then do spend some time digging around under the surface and get your hands dirty. Every single component of the car has a wonderful consistent feel to the design of it. You can see that a strong single mind stamped its presence on each design decision, right down to the choice of nuts and bolts.
Every peice of a Porsche is brutally simple, with no concessions made for fashion or cost. Its just like a really good peice of software.
Problem is, the Boxster is a damn fine car, but is perhaps the first real Porsche to have made concessions towards fashion and cost. (The VW 924 does not count, since it was a never meant to be a Porsche).
If you win the Porsche sweepstakes, then have a bit of fun in the Boxster, but then sell it, and use the money to get 1973 Carrera 2.4, or build up an insane 2.7ltr 911 RS replica. Then again, its your car, your dream, dont let me force my dream down your throat.
Having said that - whoever wins the Porsche sweepstakes needs to remember 1 very important thing - it is pronounced 'Porrr-Sch-A' not 'Porsh'. Calling a Porsche a 'Porsh' is like calling Bill Gates the 'inventor of the internet.'
Is this legal? If the spammer was unnamed as part of the deal, then the car's serial number will be a dead giveaway to the spammer's identity.
Yes I know it'd probably be at least partially illegal, but it'd be great fun to watch his pop a vein. :)
It'd probably be even more "interesting" for the IRS since the truth is probably somewhere in between given the legal line some spammers walk. Several (but not all) of the interviews and exposes with spammers known to ROKSO have shown that while some do indeed have affluent lifestyles others do not. It shouldn't be too difficult to cross check a metric like what car a spammer drives and their IRS filings against what other drivers of that model car file with the IRS and flag any anomalies. Unless that kind of data is seperated by bureacracratic red-tape for privacy reasons of course.
UNIX? They're not even circumcised! Savages!
Might just be me, but that sounds like a pretty big loop hole. I could start a company, charge a monthly fee and hold monthly membership sweepstakes (only for people who were members last month of course, this is not gambling club or anything crass like that of course)?
Given the popularity of lotteries in this country (US), I would think you run a very profitiable business in this manner, keeping a small portion of the monthly dues and running the rest like a big lottery.
Home Automation & Linux -- now I know I'm a geek
This seems to me to be very much like the ancient custom of displaying someone's head on a pike in the town square. Sure, many of us would prefer that AOL stay even closer to that tradition, but offering up some spammer's Porche isn't a bad start.
There are two important aspects to this action. First, AOL sending a clear warning to other spammers. "Stay off our network or your house may be next." Second, AOL is appeasing and entertaining its customers. "Be glad you're an AOL customer, because we're actually doing something about spam."
It's all deliciously medieval.
I seem to remember being taught that the Labor Theory of Value had more to do with explaining the injustice of compensation in a capitalist economy, not the pricing of goods.
The examples I remember being used was the industrial production process. Unmined iron ore is worth less than mined ore, steel is worth more than ore, parts made from steel are worth more than steel, assembled goods are worth more than parts. At each stage of the production process it is the labor of the workers that adds value.
Its possible (although not trivial) to assign a value to the finished product at each stage of the production process, and its possible to calculate the individual worker's contribution to the increased value.
Whenever this is done, the question that always gets asked is, is the compensation system just? Why doesn't the worker retain more of the value they added to the product? Why does management appear to get more than they contributed?
There are, of course, lots of questions about this analysis, such as the difficulty in measuring management output and added value, the role of machinery in adding value (tooling a precision gear with hand tools is an obvious example of adding value; pressing a button on a CNC machine raises questions); the fact that people willingly work for less than their labor value; the value of intangibles such as education and intellectual skill, and so on.
But anyway, that's how I remember it. In terms of OSS development vs. spammers, I don't even think the labor theory of value applies, it's actually a pricing disparity of the finished products.
It's always been this way. The first two chapters of Plato's Republic are dedicated to just this argument (that being an injust person pays better rewards than being a just one.) Granted, the arguments are crap, but the only point I'm trying to make is that the argument itself has been around for aeons.
Technically you are referring to the concept of exploitation, which was a Marx corollary to the LTV. The LTV long predates Marx, notably in the works of David Ricardo and Adam Smith. IIRC, Ricardo hinted at the idea of exploitation as the source of profit, but did not explore the idea in detail.
The answer to your machinery question is simple. In automated production systems the labor value transfers from the engineers, mathematicians and techs who designed and built the machinery, through the machinery to the commodity in question. Marx also covers your intellectual skills question in some depth in Capital.
It's funny listening to all these reactionary slashdot pricks who once read a Mises book blather on about how Labor Value is discredited. If you ever knew anyone who owned a factory you would find that they firmly believe in labor value. In fact many commonly accepted manufacturing precepts, such as statistical operator controls, are inextricably tied to the LTV (the core of "Japanese" manufacturing revolution). The same armchair economists insist that rational corporations maximize profit although it is empirically demonstrable that they more often maximize market share.
Marginal utility is a great tool for investigating value. But while it has driven the LVT from the University of Chicago campus, it has not replaced it in the real world. Marx screwed up his math a bit, but propaganda side he still makes perfect sense in the real world. He (or maybe more accurately Engels) was also an entertaining writer.
This country is overrun with moronic semi-educated ideologues wielding computers.
AOL does not pay for the cost of disposing of the snail mail they send.
More sugar!
I wish that this would be auctioned up amongst spam fighters :/
:]
... :]
I just lost an important email to spam (saw it in with the junk email *just* as I deleted it all). I have thus been taking it out on the next few spammers.
I sure wish someone would give us a free car for hunting down these scumbags
I doubt this will be very common, though. The last spammer I heard about was living in a double-wide trailer in Florida. I'm not sure they'd care to auction that
AOL spams snail mail at their own cost. Spammers spam e-mail at the cost of those who operate the mail servers.
You pay. Snail mail is subsidized by the government. Heavily. If people knew what it actually cost to mail a letter, they'd have a fit. Bulk mail actually costs less (because it's bulk) even though "bulk" mail is mostly UCS. So in fact, YOU are paying more for it than if you were sending me a similar package.
Doesn't it make you feel all warm and fuzzy inside?
The U.S. government makes it federal crimes to compete with the Post Office and your mail box is federal property, even though you are responsible for purchasing and maintaining it. If these barriers were removed and people were allowed to choose freely, we could cut spam down tremendously: everything people are recommending for email spam could be applied to snail mail spam--author verification, valid return addresses, etc. But none of this will happen as long as the government is the only player. There was a reason for government rule in this area 150 years ago, but not anymore. Any jackass can start a local postal company and should be able to.
Someone asked if I had patched against MSBlast; I said yes, I installed Linux.
"The real pirates (selling illegal copies) are also making money, but that's not who the RIAA/MPAA is chasing."
The RIAA has always been chasing the big guys of the pirating world -- the ones who run the duplicating houses and sell their wares in Times Square -- and they still do. However, many people incorrectly assume that their recent suits against file sharers come at the exclusion of all other activities. This is probably because we don't read about those sorts of things on Slashdot. However, it was pretty trivial to find these stories on the RIAA web site:
http://www.riaa.com/news/newsletter/021804.asp
http://www.riaa.com/news/newsletter/122303.asp
http://www.riaa.com/news/newsletter/121603.asp
There are more cases which aren't listed on the RIAA web site because it's law enforcement who are handling the job, with little or no help from the RIAA. Anybody who is interested can find plenty by googling on "criminal copyright infringement indictment."
Sitting in my day care, the art is decopainted.