Let's say you're right. Spam only costs "$.00001 to $.0005"
Joe Schmucko sends out 10m emails to all valid addresses through some poor Korean junior high with an unsecured mail server.
$.00001 to $.0005 * 10m = $100 to $5,000.
That assumes he doesn't crash anyone's servers.
My time's worth, say, $20/hour. ID/delete takes a second. That's ~$.006/spam, assuming I don't run it through spamcop.
And the total cost to all the recipients: $60,000.
That's just in straight costs, too. We should also toss in the cost of running RBLs, the cost of me actually running down obfusciated URLs... and so on.
Spam is theft of services. That legislation hasn't yet recognized this because it's a new area doesn't mean it doesn't violate the intent of the law. You can't come over to my house and drive my car around, but for now, there's no legal recourse for many people who get their inbox turned unusable.
Used books are good for any number of reasons: - ecologically, used books = no new resources expended, no landfill required - lowered price points mean poorer readers (like me, for years) can afford to assemble a decent library without paying $30/hardback - lowered prices mean I can pick up books of an author unavailable at my under-funded branch library mean that I can look at more authors, finding ones I want to buy new in the future - used book dealers like the ones that sell on Amazon are really the last bastions of independent thought and customer service, because they can't compete on the razor-thin margins B&N/Borders/etc have brought to the new book market
By their logic, instead of lending or giving my friends good books I think they might like, I should burn my copy and then direct them to the nearest B&N. What a load of crap.
I write, I make some money at it, and my library is easily 50% stuff I bought used at Half Price Books or my other local hole-in-wall places. Screw these morons. Used books rule.
Re:Mmmm.. FUN! And a legal nightmare..
on
Spy v. Spy
·
· Score: 1
Why would you be fired if the company snoopware destroys anti-snoopware? If I'm curious whether my employer's monitoring my machine because my internet apps run really slowly, so I look at task manager to see if there are any unusual processes running, that's not grounds to fire me (well, I guess you could argue I'm wasting company resources by looking at task manager instead of enhancing shareholder value).
Unless your company's got a real strict "don't even look, much less install" policy, there's no reason you'd get fired for checking into whether they're looking at you.
This has always been my favorite part of tron -- the 5s grid bug creation CG, which is commented on and then never mentioned again in the entire movie.
I'm convinced it was done earlier as a proof-of-concept or something, but they thought it was so cool they had to work it in.
Can someone who has the new edition comment on that -- were the grid bugs supposed to be important and then cut down, or are they just a funny aside tossed in?
Wow, 22 comments and no one read the article. It talks about how it's designed to help segment your customers -- while this probably has evil applications, the releases DC is sending out seem to be targeted to, say, Amazon-type companies that want to send emails to their own customer base.
I had the same experience with NetFlix service going south. I started when they didn't have any service levels over $20, and every time they offered a higher level I joined. I watched an amazing number of videos for years. And then I started having problems with not being able to get movies I wanted, queueing issues, and I wrote them some really long, detailed messages about what was wrong and how it could be fixed...
and all I got were AnswerBot replies. Eventually, when I was paying $35/mo for nothing, I quit, and haven't missed it even if it means I have to go way out of my way when I want to see "Violent Cop" or other cool foreign flicks my local Hollywood doesn't stock.
I didn't expect them to call me up and give me free service for ideas, but as a long-time customer who recommended them to many people, I would have liked to have had someone take a couple minutes to write me a nice email. Going the PayPal route of customer service doesn't inspire confidence.
They're essentially saying here that by eliminating return trips (which will never happen, but that's another point), they save gas.
But what they're totally ignoring is the cost to produce, and re-stock these things. Say you're Joe Videostoreowner, and you've got 1,000 DVDs in stock for rental. FlexPlay gives you a huge amount of cash to move to these things. Now you're not in the rental business, where you hold a fixed stock and the money rolls in, you're in the sales business -- which has an advantage in that if "Night Eyes 9" sits on the shelf forever, once someone rents it you don't have to re-stcok it.
You're now in the retail business-- every movie that goes out never comes back, so you have to re-order stock constantly, it has to get shipped to you, then you have to unpack it and stock it. Anyone who's seen a Hollywood when the week's new movies come in knows what a mess this is... and with FlexPlay, it'd be even worse.
From the video store's viewpoint, unless they're masochistic and want to run a traditional retail operation, there's no reason they'd even consider this.
This is a whole new level in what the spyware types have attempted. It's not serving you more ads, or even (as that @#$@# webhancer does) tracking the URLs you vist, and how long you spend -- this thing actually harvests data off web forms and sends it in.
It's like a security alert, privacy violation, and alarming new trend, all rolled up in one, and/. rejected it all week long as I (and many others) tried to send in submissions that adequately conveyed why this is so interesting.
It's one thing if you want to opt-out of, say, eBay notifications or some random newsletter, but even then -- some annoying professional statistics organization decided I wanted their email conference/newsletter/membership spam, and they've got unspoofed headers, real organization, but trying to convince them to remove me has resulted in lost time, headaches, and more and more spam from them.
Confirmed opt-in is the only acceptable way. Anything else you should complain about, not opt-out.
Depending on the industry you work in, you may be required to retain all relevant documentation for years -- in the LD telecom world, I had to maintain a database that had 3 years of collections data, including writeoff and delinquent amount information, but when I build a similar beast elsewhere, I got away with 6 months.
Seriously -- if you don't check with the legal types on what the information is and what it relates to, you could be legally liable for obstruction of justice/personal harm. The lecture I got on this turned my hair curly. Make the lawyers earn their money and break down what you can and can't destory, and when. If you've got any kind of assets to protect, this is a must.
That's true, but watches don't have ports, and most only have one control - the time adjustment. If you've got a wearable that's got one of the small multi-chord keyboards (or whatever), that's a long ways more complicated and subject to getting messed up... and if you use a touch-screen, you've got a whole new related set of problems.
And if you've got ports of any kind of complexity (that is, beyond a headphone jack -- something with pins, or catches), that's where I think you'll really get into trouble... and this is where wireless protocols can really help, as well.
-- q
One of the barriers we're going to see to using truly wearable computers is that you accumulate a huge amount of grime. Now, it's no big deal for us, because we shower/toss clothes in the laundry, but for electronic devices of any sort, that kind of constant close exposure to lint, skin flakes, dirt, and grime has the potential to seriously degrade fragile devices. It's one thing to have these things work when you tie one on in your lab, and an another thing entirely to have a real device survive the day-to-day buildup of abuse and layers of crap that'll accumulate on it.
I think when you can toss your wearable into the laundry along with your collection of failed dot.com T-shirts is when these things will really be ready for long-term use.
This won't (and doesn't) work. When contributions by industries or companies is banned or they wish to donate more than they're able to by law, they compensate their own employees with more cash and then expect them to support issues or candidates with that money as a condition of continued employment.
Now you can say you'd ban that kind of thing, but once the paper trail disappears, you'd be getting into whether these employees freely support these canidates as part of their own interests, or as proxies, and that's dangerous territory to get into.
An alternate, better solution is publically-funded elections, but that's a whole other discussion.
Does anyone know what summoning's like in FFX?
on
More Final Fantasy Bits
·
· Score: 2, Funny
I seriously stopped playing FF8 because the summoning animations took so long -- Alexander took what, 2 minutes? And you had to use them over and over to ensure affinity so you could summon them up fast during the boss battles. It got so bad I would actually give the commands, get up, get a beer, pour it into a mug, and return before I had to do anything. FF7 was bad, but 8 was unbearable for me.
So needless to say I'm really concerned to hear that FFX has a ton of summoning. Has anyone played the import and can speak to this?
That's a little simplistic -- the Times is a family-owned facist fish-wrapper, while the PI is a Hearst-owned more moderate (but hardly liberal) bird cage liner. Neither really represents the spectrum of the area's political views or does enough to go after the entrenched corporate welfare that goes on in this town.
This isn't true -- Razor sold "best of" CDs. $40, cash only. I ordered one when I checked it out as part of an.nfo file included with a release. They took the money, never sent CDs. When I bitched on #razor1911 or whatever the IRC channel was, they laughed about it and said they didn't know what had happened to the guys running that piece, which may or may not have been true -- but they knew about it and had given the go-ahead for someone w/in the group to compile the CDs and organize the.nfo ads in all the releases that came out for a while.
Being ripped off served me right, but that's a whole other story.
"I get the feeling they want this to work, if only because it lets them get a foot in the car door with subscription-based services."
So car manufacturers want to adopt practices of other industries? I find it hard to believe that there's a great consumer need out there for car-delievered subscription services, since the vast majority of car owners spend such a limited (if regular) time in their cars that it doesn't offer the value DirecTV/cable/DSL/etc offer.
Further, the car's considered a big, expensive appliance, like a washing machine -- customers aren't going to spend extra monthly over the life of the car for something like leather seats. I think the potential market the car makers are trying to tap into is extremely limited, but look towards their attempts with fear.
I'm annoyed British thinks that different problem-solving approaches outside of Asia would hamper the game. That players in America are (perhaps) less willing to pledge their loyalty easily or submit to authority doesn't mean that Lineage would suck more here.
Maybe that means that American players respond better to causes than fealty, or that they tend to form or volunteer for skills-based groups to accomplish specifc tasks (for varying motivations) and vote for the person they think can best lead them. The citizen-soldier ideal America fields results in vastly superior lower-level performance as units can react to events they face quicker and better than, say, heirarchial-based phalanxes or some shit.
The point being that looking at cultures as impediments to success rather than seeing that as a challenge to improve gameplay is narrow-sighted and wrong. If he can't figure that out about his own country of residence, I think he's blinded by his own success.
Sorry if I wasn't clearer: Peapod doesn't deserve to go in the sense that they're bad people, they deserve to go in the sense that they have a bad business model.
As to whether Peapod has to stock food or not, I don't think it really matters whether it's a grocery chain with delivery service like Albertsons.com or a delivery service that gets its food elsewhere -- my point was that it's really more of a brick-and-mortar service company than a pure IT company like, say, eBay, which doesn't have to maintain a fleet of trucks and drivers. --q
Now they are starting to collapse just like brick and motar counterparts.
Here's the thing -- many of these companies, like Peapod, are essentially brick and mortar companies. Peapod has to maintain a delivery fleet and drivers, a distribution network, along with a huge inventory in food, and its only real advantage over having groceries delivered from, say, QFC is a snazzier front-end. It has all of the costs and none of the advantages of an established retail chain.
Amazon, by contrast, has a marked advantage over the retail Barnes and Noble: no sales tax in most states, no storefronts, just the front end, some fancy servers, and a couple of contracts with distribution houses to ship stuff out with Amazon bookmarks in it (sounds like a business process patent in the making to me).
What we're likely to see in the coming months is a shake-out of firms whos creation on or migration to electronic commerce was ill-advised in the first place, and firms who don't have any competitive advantage over traditional providers. -- q
One of the things I think is overlooked about PG is that it's been a great boon to the usefulness of PDAs. I've really enjoyed being able to download Shakespeare's sonnets and read them on the bus/in boring meetings, and beam them between Palms without hassle. Gutenberg's work has made me realize a lot of the value of free, portable, historical works.
Thanks to Gutenberg, I'm much better educated, literature-wise, and much more convinced of the future potential of handhelds in spreading information and knowledge cheaply and effectively. -- q
He is entitled to his view. This is Slashdot, not Linux lovers anonymous. People can like M$ if they want to, even if you don't
Totally true. However, he consistently posts pro-MS propaganda and tears down MS' competitors. IIRC, he actually works for MS and used to admit it in his posts. This isn't about viewpoints, it's about consistently taking a adversarial viewpoint to further himself.
Have you read the moderator guidlines? Just because you don't agree with the points raised in the post, doesn't mean that someone cannot say something insightful, or funny, or informative etc.
Totally true, but I don't understand why someone who trolls for MS is consistently rewarded for it. Hence my question. You didn't moderate the post, so the moderator in question obviously had diferent views to you. When you are moderating, you may moderate the guy down. Until then, live with it.
Also true.
As for whether or not people will stop whining about moderation, well, improved forum moderation is a need, and until it's fixed, questions like this are going to arise. --q
Slashdot Mirror
Let's say you're right. Spam only costs "$.00001 to $.0005"
Joe Schmucko sends out 10m emails to all valid addresses through some poor Korean junior high with an unsecured mail server.
$.00001 to $.0005 * 10m = $100 to $5,000.
That assumes he doesn't crash anyone's servers.
My time's worth, say, $20/hour. ID/delete takes a second. That's ~$.006/spam, assuming I don't run it through spamcop.
And the total cost to all the recipients: $60,000.
That's just in straight costs, too. We should also toss in the cost of running RBLs, the cost of me actually running down obfusciated URLs... and so on.
Spam is theft of services. That legislation hasn't yet recognized this because it's a new area doesn't mean it doesn't violate the intent of the law. You can't come over to my house and drive my car around, but for now, there's no legal recourse for many people who get their inbox turned unusable.
Used books are good for any number of reasons:
- ecologically, used books = no new resources expended, no landfill required
- lowered price points mean poorer readers (like me, for years) can afford to assemble a decent library without paying $30/hardback
- lowered prices mean I can pick up books of an author unavailable at my under-funded branch library mean that I can look at more authors, finding ones I want to buy new in the future
- used book dealers like the ones that sell on Amazon are really the last bastions of independent thought and customer service, because they can't compete on the razor-thin margins B&N/Borders/etc have brought to the new book market
By their logic, instead of lending or giving my friends good books I think they might like, I should burn my copy and then direct them to the nearest B&N. What a load of crap.
I write, I make some money at it, and my library is easily 50% stuff I bought used at Half Price Books or my other local hole-in-wall places. Screw these morons. Used books rule.
Why would you be fired if the company snoopware destroys anti-snoopware? If I'm curious whether my employer's monitoring my machine because my internet apps run really slowly, so I look at task manager to see if there are any unusual processes running, that's not grounds to fire me (well, I guess you could argue I'm wasting company resources by looking at task manager instead of enhancing shareholder value).
Unless your company's got a real strict "don't even look, much less install" policy, there's no reason you'd get fired for checking into whether they're looking at you.
-- q
I'm convinced it was done earlier as a proof-of-concept or something, but they thought it was so cool they had to work it in.
Can someone who has the new edition comment on that -- were the grid bugs supposed to be important and then cut down, or are they just a funny aside tossed in?
-- q
It doesn't appear to be spam-tastic at all -- they talk through the whole thing about newsletters/customer bases/permission-based marketing.
You guys really want to go after a spam tool provider, go nuke Earth Online, or any of the guys who produce stealth emailers.
-- q
Wow, 22 comments and no one read the article. It talks about how it's designed to help segment your customers -- while this probably has evil applications, the releases DC is sending out seem to be targeted to, say, Amazon-type companies that want to send emails to their own customer base.
-- q
I had the same experience with NetFlix service going south. I started when they didn't have any service levels over $20, and every time they offered a higher level I joined. I watched an amazing number of videos for years. And then I started having problems with not being able to get movies I wanted, queueing issues, and I wrote them some really long, detailed messages about what was wrong and how it could be fixed...
and all I got were AnswerBot replies. Eventually, when I was paying $35/mo for nothing, I quit, and haven't missed it even if it means I have to go way out of my way when I want to see "Violent Cop" or other cool foreign flicks my local Hollywood doesn't stock.
I didn't expect them to call me up and give me free service for ideas, but as a long-time customer who recommended them to many people, I would have liked to have had someone take a couple minutes to write me a nice email. Going the PayPal route of customer service doesn't inspire confidence.
-- q
They're essentially saying here that by eliminating return trips (which will never happen, but that's another point), they save gas.
But what they're totally ignoring is the cost to produce, and re-stock these things. Say you're Joe Videostoreowner, and you've got 1,000 DVDs in stock for rental. FlexPlay gives you a huge amount of cash to move to these things. Now you're not in the rental business, where you hold a fixed stock and the money rolls in, you're in the sales business -- which has an advantage in that if "Night Eyes 9" sits on the shelf forever, once someone rents it you don't have to re-stcok it.
You're now in the retail business-- every movie that goes out never comes back, so you have to re-order stock constantly, it has to get shipped to you, then you have to unpack it and stock it. Anyone who's seen a Hollywood when the week's new movies come in knows what a mess this is... and with FlexPlay, it'd be even worse.
From the video store's viewpoint, unless they're masochistic and want to run a traditional retail operation, there's no reason they'd even consider this.
So yay, death to FlexPlay
-- q
This is a whole new level in what the spyware types have attempted. It's not serving you more ads, or even (as that @#$@# webhancer does) tracking the URLs you vist, and how long you spend -- this thing actually harvests data off web forms and sends it in.
/. rejected it all week long as I (and many others) tried to send in submissions that adequately conveyed why this is so interesting.
It's like a security alert, privacy violation, and alarming new trend, all rolled up in one, and
-- q
It's one thing if you want to opt-out of, say, eBay notifications or some random newsletter, but even then -- some annoying professional statistics organization decided I wanted their email conference/newsletter/membership spam, and they've got unspoofed headers, real organization, but trying to convince them to remove me has resulted in lost time, headaches, and more and more spam from them.
Confirmed opt-in is the only acceptable way. Anything else you should complain about, not opt-out.
-- q
Good news for Neverwinter Nights means higher spirits, more story episodes, and more frequent updates at Megatokyo... at least until it's released.
-- q
Seriously -- if you don't check with the legal types on what the information is and what it relates to, you could be legally liable for obstruction of justice/personal harm. The lecture I got on this turned my hair curly. Make the lawyers earn their money and break down what you can and can't destory, and when. If you've got any kind of assets to protect, this is a must.
-- q
That's true, but watches don't have ports, and most only have one control - the time adjustment. If you've got a wearable that's got one of the small multi-chord keyboards (or whatever), that's a long ways more complicated and subject to getting messed up... and if you use a touch-screen, you've got a whole new related set of problems.
And if you've got ports of any kind of complexity (that is, beyond a headphone jack -- something with pins, or catches), that's where I think you'll really get into trouble... and this is where wireless protocols can really help, as well.
-- q
I think when you can toss your wearable into the laundry along with your collection of failed dot.com T-shirts is when these things will really be ready for long-term use.
-- q
Now you can say you'd ban that kind of thing, but once the paper trail disappears, you'd be getting into whether these employees freely support these canidates as part of their own interests, or as proxies, and that's dangerous territory to get into.
An alternate, better solution is publically-funded elections, but that's a whole other discussion.
So needless to say I'm really concerned to hear that FFX has a ton of summoning. Has anyone played the import and can speak to this?
-- q
-- q
Being ripped off served me right, but that's a whole other story.
-- q
So car manufacturers want to adopt practices of other industries? I find it hard to believe that there's a great consumer need out there for car-delievered subscription services, since the vast majority of car owners spend such a limited (if regular) time in their cars that it doesn't offer the value DirecTV/cable/DSL/etc offer.
Further, the car's considered a big, expensive appliance, like a washing machine -- customers aren't going to spend extra monthly over the life of the car for something like leather seats. I think the potential market the car makers are trying to tap into is extremely limited, but look towards their attempts with fear.
-- q
Maybe that means that American players respond better to causes than fealty, or that they tend to form or volunteer for skills-based groups to accomplish specifc tasks (for varying motivations) and vote for the person they think can best lead them. The citizen-soldier ideal America fields results in vastly superior lower-level performance as units can react to events they face quicker and better than, say, heirarchial-based phalanxes or some shit.
The point being that looking at cultures as impediments to success rather than seeing that as a challenge to improve gameplay is narrow-sighted and wrong. If he can't figure that out about his own country of residence, I think he's blinded by his own success.
As to whether Peapod has to stock food or not, I don't think it really matters whether it's a grocery chain with delivery service like Albertsons.com or a delivery service that gets its food elsewhere -- my point was that it's really more of a brick-and-mortar service company than a pure IT company like, say, eBay, which doesn't have to maintain a fleet of trucks and drivers. --q
Here's the thing -- many of these companies, like Peapod, are essentially brick and mortar companies. Peapod has to maintain a delivery fleet and drivers, a distribution network, along with a huge inventory in food, and its only real advantage over having groceries delivered from, say, QFC is a snazzier front-end. It has all of the costs and none of the advantages of an established retail chain.
Amazon, by contrast, has a marked advantage over the retail Barnes and Noble: no sales tax in most states, no storefronts, just the front end, some fancy servers, and a couple of contracts with distribution houses to ship stuff out with Amazon bookmarks in it (sounds like a business process patent in the making to me).
What we're likely to see in the coming months is a shake-out of firms whos creation on or migration to electronic commerce was ill-advised in the first place, and firms who don't have any competitive advantage over traditional providers. -- q
Thanks to Gutenberg, I'm much better educated, literature-wise, and much more convinced of the future potential of handhelds in spreading information and knowledge cheaply and effectively. -- q
He is entitled to his view. This is Slashdot, not Linux lovers anonymous. People can like M$ if they want to, even if you don't
Totally true. However, he consistently posts pro-MS propaganda and tears down MS' competitors. IIRC, he actually works for MS and used to admit it in his posts. This isn't about viewpoints, it's about consistently taking a adversarial viewpoint to further himself.
Have you read the moderator guidlines? Just because you don't agree with the points raised in the post, doesn't mean that someone cannot say something insightful, or funny, or informative etc.
Totally true, but I don't understand why someone who trolls for MS is consistently rewarded for it. Hence my question. You didn't moderate the post, so the moderator in question obviously had diferent views to you. When you are moderating, you may moderate the guy down. Until then, live with it.
Also true.
As for whether or not people will stop whining about moderation, well, improved forum moderation is a need, and until it's fixed, questions like this are going to arise. --q
I would defy anyone to read through your comment history and not conclude you're a troll.