A simpler solution would be for the manufactures of these routers to have them refuse to act as routers with any of the default settings. i.e. with the default settings you could connect to it for configuration, but no Internet access until the password, SSID, etc had been changed.
Dude, ATM machines don't even have futuristic features like that. Come back to reality.
I'm actually curious - for how long do the 16 qubits stay coherent? You can only do quantum computations while the qubits remain coherent. Furthermore, IIRC coherence times where (at best) in the range of a few microseconds.
That's why quantum computers will be so fast. If not, they will constantly forget... Damn. Where was I going with this?
Well... It's Charter's network, so I guess they can do what they want, eh?
That depends on how they are selling it. Would that argument hold up if they were blocking http traffic from comcast.com, verizon.com, etc?
Accurate DNS would probably be an assumed necessity for consumer-level "internet access". If they are actively and intentionally shipping bogus DNS info, there could be some opportunity for lawyers to get some billable hours in.
The reason why I mentioned Americas Army was because of them excluding the possibility of using the 'bad' side: As it's only multiplayer, two teams are opposing eachother but both, from their POV, are the Americans... One could of course reason that I shouldn't be expecting more from a game named "AMERICAS Army", but together with the overall propaganda of the game, it has been a game that has bothered me for some time.
The public release of "America's Army" was primarily as a recruitment tool, or at least an experiment of one. This postion forced certain design decisions. All of this was announced when the game was launched.
If, for example, Honda funded, developed, and gave away a new driving game that explored novel gameplay avenues and was a moderate success, would you be bothered because you could only drive Hondas in the game, or would you just accept the game for what it was: a glossy brochure with good replay value?
It's $115 at Newegg and holds up to 4 x 1G of 184 pin DDR.
4 gigs isn't much, but for certain situations, like holding a small database with heavy use, they work great. For random I/O, they are obscenely fast for the price...about twice the speed of two striped Raptors with a good controller.
I'm not sure I'm too keen on Michael Crichton after his comments about global warming. I don't think gene patents are a swell idea, but I'm not sure I'd hold up Crichton as an authority on scientific matters.
Yes, because science works like a democracy. A bunch of us get together and vote on the laws of nature, and nature obeys. If you step out of line and promote a theory opposing "the consensus of the scientific community", then we burn you at the stake _and_ revoke your funding.
Trust us. It's better this way. Do you know how annoying it is when some uppity prick like Newton or Einstein comes along and claims that all the old theories are wrong? It really sucks when they manage to prove it, because the rest of us look like we're sitting there with our thumbs up our asses.
Global Warming is a celebrity field right now, and it will keep alot of us employed for a very long time. You can understand why we are a little protective of our sacred consensus, right?
He does say it's worthless. He says it's like a lame party where you drink alone and dance alone. He says that local multiplayer is the only good way to play multiplayer. The author is a tool. Go ahead, call me a moron and tell me I don't understand what I just read. You've already done it to someone else.
The author also completely ignores that online multiplayer is popular is because it's better than the alternatives.
Single player is far less compelling, as AI opponents get stale much faster. Local multiplayer is simply not practical in most situations.
Until my console fits on my keychain or IBM invests some serious effort into FPS bots (Deep Pwn, anyone?), I'll be resorting to playing online...not because it's perfect, but because it's more fun.
If you keep a dangerous instrumentality on your property, and it causes damage to others, you are liable for that if the harm is foreseeable.
That is only true if all responsible parties are held to a reasonable level of accountability.
If you found out that your oven was, without your knowledge, part of a local arson ring, you'd be pretty upset a being held accountable for the neighborhood damages. You'd probably blame Kenmore for making such a thing remotely possibly in the first place, since it has no connection with how or why you bought the oven in the first place.
Until the hardware mfgrs, OS mfgrs, software mfgrs, and users are all held to roughly similar standards, you can't place all blame on the user.
To put things a different way: -If 1% of your products cause widespread damage, then 1% of your users are idiots. -If 5% of your products cause widespread damage, then 5% of your users need training. -If 25% of your products cause widespread damage, then you are the idiot.
He's a professor. Without professors, there is no university. With the possible exception of flooding the network so that it is unusable, he should be free to do anything he wants with the network.
Yes...and no...
In academic IT, there really is only one cardinal rule for users: do nothing that interferes with others' ability to use the network. Beyond that, as long as some behavior is remotely academics related, accommodations can be made. Is this professor interfering with the network? Indirectly, yes. He is circumventing essentially all of the tools IT can use to maintain the network's functionality. He is opening the university network to carrying traffic over which nobody in the university has control. He is, in effect, monopolizing the time of the university IT staff by being such a special case.
There are other ways of handling the situation. He could have his own private external connection, for example.
If a physics professor wanted to build a new wind tunnel that would be so loud it would disturb the other activies of the school, would it be an oppression of academic freedom to not allow it in the middle of campus? Build it somewhere else.
I think you both have VERY valid points. I think the GP poster, however, is pointing out that homosexuality by its own merit and/or purpose, cannot be a result of nature or natural selection (evolution)
Why? Because they don't reproduce? Explain the existence worker bees.
Gene propogation need not happen directly. An organism can also increase the representation of its own genes in future generations by promoting the reproductive success of relatives that carry similar genes.
Humans are highly social animals with small litters and they place extraordinarily high investments in single offspring. It's quite rational to theorize that a non-zero percentage of non-reproductive members in a family can improve the success of the family offspring simply by being available as a surrogate parent with out prior or potential commitment to children of their own.
From a Darwinian perspective, a homosexual would make a better replacement parent than a heterosexual, since should the reproductive one have children of their own, they would be, genetically speaking, more valuable offspring, and the heterosexual surrogates would have no genetic incentive to provide equal consideration to their nieces and nephews. The homosexual surrogate, however, would assign them equal genetic value.
I was born one mornin' when the sun didn't shine I picked up my shovel and I walked to the mine I loaded sixteen tons of number nine coal And the straw boss said "Well, a-bless my soul"
You load sixteen tons, what do you get Another day older and deeper in debt Saint Peter don't you call me 'cause I can't go I owe my soul to the company store...
Not really. The courts require Mens Rea [wikipedia.org] before they can convict. No Mens Rea, no culpability, no crime. This is a basic requirement and can't be avoided (unless Russian corts are very, very weird). A bit on the scale of "No body, no crime".
Infringing copyright is a strict-liability offence. The offender's state of mind is irrelevant in such offences. Well-known strict-liability offences include most traffic violations or statutory rape. It does not matter if you thought the parking space was legal or if you thought your partner was an adult...you are just as guilty either way.
On the other hand, you can't be punished for Mens Rea in a strict-liability offence. You cannot receive a ticket for "attempted speeding", no matter how hard you push that Yugo.
If a patient abuses a drug, or refuses to take the full course of drugs (in, say, a case of TB), is that the doctor's fault? There is only so much that a professional can do to mitigate against the stupidity of an end user. Perhaps password authentication is flawed, but I don't see you proposing a better solution. Perhaps BofA's system is fundamentally flawed, but I don't see you offering anything else. Regardless, at some point it is up to the user to protect their own interests by not taking 30 sleeping pills at a time, or giving out their passwords to other people.
If 60 of 67 patients fail to take the medicine, then yes, the "doctor", referring to the whole system, is completely at fault. There is little you can do about the greater fool at the tail of the bell curve, but when the majority of your users act in a particular fashion, that's not stupidity, it's normal behavior. As the "professional", it is your duty to foresee and accomodate the common uses of your product
If the doors weren't locked, it isn't B&E. Unlawful Entry, perhaps, but unless something was damaged (eg the lock) in the entering process, it cannot be Breaking and Entering.
You are thinking of Forced Entry. The "breaking" in B&E refers too crossing the public/private line, i.e. "breaking the plane".
I mean consider an appropriate physical analogy for what this kid did. It would be like if he walked into a bookstore that looked to be open but turned out that the staff had taken the day off and gone home but forgot to lock up but then instead of stealing anything rearranged all the books so they spelled out funny comments and left a little note on the cash register suggesting they lock the store next time.
Breaking & Entering Criminal Trespass Burglary (even if nothing is stolen!) Vandalism
Your little "joke" costs real money. The extra staff time required to resort and reinventory a medium-size bookstore is at least several thousand dollars. Just like keying cars, slashing tires, breaking windows, smashing mailboxes, etc., it's called being an asshole.
Obviously it isn't a good idea to release a javascript worm like this but it surely doesn't deserve more than community service and a good scolding. If the people in the system understood the technology it would do just that.
The "people in the system" understand technology far better than this kid. They understand that there are real people running these systems whose time is valuable, and when some idiot delinquent thinks he's being funny, he's the only one laughing.
Now you might argue that she is a customer that thats hardly justification. A more compelling argument is that its his job to never lose his cool and always be polite. So he'll get fired over this. Which is a shame because in my book he tried to do his job and dealt with an angry customer the right way. People don't like it when your firm and clear with them and want things sugar coated. She wasn't worth it.
She also doesn't know how to get things her way.
Never let your first point of contact with customer service escalate the call if the problem is actually your fault. Keep trying different avenues of approach until you hit the soft spot. Push for empathy, and don't blame anyone or anything. Use phrases like "I've really found myself in a bind here, and I'm not sure who can help me out." Note the important implications of "found myself"="could happen to anyone", "in a bind"="not quite life-or-death", "I'm not sure who"=easy handoff for the stonewallers, and "who can help me out"="obviously someone can help me". There will always be some eager trainee that doesn't know or a jaded short-timer that doesn't care about corporate policy. Let them be your hero. If possible, target the opposite sex.
If you still can't find a way in, then politely escalate the issue. Never mention how many times you contacted them or what the other contacts told you. That's the difference between desperation and nagging.
The problem with that approach I think, is that by the time you become a competent C++ programmer, you no longer have the ability to see things the same way a "newbie" does. I want tonnes and tonnes of options in my applications.
Being a competent programmer has almost no overlap with being a good user-interface designer. The problem is not "programmers can't think like newbies", it's "programmers think they can do UI because UI is just another part of the program." They can't.
Until the DE and app devs start realizing "oh shit, I have absolutely no clue what I'm doing with the interface, and I need to involve someone who does.", Linux won't ever crack the desktop market. XP and OSX are a decade ahead.
PS: Before you reply with "I'm a good programmer and a good UI designer", let me guess: you probably think you are a good driver too. These are just areas where people are notoriously inaccurate with self-assessment. Get a qualified second opinion.
Imagine your wife's grandma's heirloom china set is worth $400 on the market, but priceless to her. You have recently dropped one plate, and it's irreplaceable. The plate is worth $80 on the market. 6 months later, you see the plate on Ebay, drawing insipid bidding, reflecting relatively low demand, stuck at $40. Your web design business has been doing well, and you can afford $200 to get back in grace with your wife. You therefore bid $200, raising the current bid to $42. On the final day, you see a series of bids in , all by the same person, raising the price to $160. This is the point at which the shiller did not dare to raise the bid for fear of outbidding you.
The same trick works in reverse..you short-sell the very item you want to buy. If that $40 plate is worth $200 dollars to you, you could make a new listing for it and bid $50. The real seller can no longer shill you up to $160, because, from his perspective, he's in competition with another seller. You'll have to eat the listing fees on a $50 item, but that's cheaper than what the shilling could cost you.
Just make sure that your listing closes after the original and you win the first auction. This covers you in case someone walks in at the last minute offering $10,000 on your listing...you'll actually have a plate to sell.
The damage is that this is fraud. And it does inflate prices on things you are trying to purchase. For example, if I want a something on eBay, and I put a bid of $100 on that. But the going rate is only $50, so my bid sits at $50. Then right before the auction ends, a shill bidder comes in, and jacks the price up to $95. I am now paying $95 for a product I should have rightly only paid $50 for!
If you are willing to pay $100 for the item, and the seller is willing to accept $100 for the item, then the market value of the item is $100. There is no "should have rightly only paid $50 for". If you are only willing to pay $50, don't bid $100.
Well let's assume you have a four-person household, and each person watches an average of 30 hours a week of TV. That's 6240 hours a year. If your cable bill is $720 a year, then that's about 11c per hour, or 6c for a half-hour show. It's effectively a 1700% markup.
An average of $0.06/per episode does not mean all shows are worth $0.06. The viewer could consider his few favorites worth $2 and all the rest to be worth $0.04. Claiming "It's effectively a 1700% markup." is meaningless, because people are only going to purchase the high-value content, not the 3AM infomercials.
36000 episodes per month at a mere $0.0014 each! If they take my suggestion, I'll be paying nearly 100 times more than that! How can they possibly go wrong! The maths don't lie!
The author assumes all TV programming is of equal value. People generally assign vastly different values to different shows. An individual could easily consider his favorite show to be worth more than $1.99/episode while still assigning a very low value to the same amount of programming selected randomly.
Slashdot Mirror
Yet, if your car failed to start if you weren't buckled up, people would go ballistic.
If they aren't buckled up, they are going ballistic anyways...it's just a matter of time.
A simpler solution would be for the manufactures of these routers to have them refuse to act as routers with any of the default settings. i.e. with the default settings you could connect to it for configuration, but no Internet access until the password, SSID, etc had been changed.
1 9242
Dude, ATM machines don't even have futuristic features like that. Come back to reality.
http://it.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=06/09/21/18
This is a contract, it's been digitally signed.
Contracts require consideration on behalf of both parties. If one side pays nothing, it's not a contract.
But for doing your taxes or playing Quake it would be completely useless.
I'm not sure about that...I've heard rumors of IBM unleashing Deep Pwn upon the FPS world next year
I'm actually curious - for how long do the 16 qubits stay coherent? You can only do quantum computations while the qubits remain coherent. Furthermore, IIRC coherence times where (at best) in the range of a few microseconds.
That's why quantum computers will be so fast. If not, they will constantly forget... Damn. Where was I going with this?
Well... It's Charter's network, so I guess they can do what they want, eh?
That depends on how they are selling it. Would that argument hold up if they were blocking http traffic from comcast.com, verizon.com, etc?
Accurate DNS would probably be an assumed necessity for consumer-level "internet access". If they are actively and intentionally shipping bogus DNS info, there could be some opportunity for lawyers to get some billable hours in.
The reason why I mentioned Americas Army was because of them excluding the possibility of using the 'bad' side: As it's only multiplayer, two teams are opposing eachother but both, from their POV, are the Americans... One could of course reason that I shouldn't be expecting more from a game named "AMERICAS Army", but together with the overall propaganda of the game, it has been a game that has bothered me for some time.
The public release of "America's Army" was primarily as a recruitment tool, or at least an experiment of one. This postion forced certain design decisions. All of this was announced when the game was launched.
If, for example, Honda funded, developed, and gave away a new driving game that explored novel gameplay avenues and was a moderate success, would you be bothered because you could only drive Hondas in the game, or would you just accept the game for what it was: a glossy brochure with good replay value?
I am sure there are others, but this would be the coolest.
c ts_Overview.aspx?ProductID=2180
They all run at similar temperatures.
The Cenatek RocketDrive you link to is a very dated product...it's not even bootable. Here is a more practical option:
http://www.gigabyte.com.tw/Products/Storage/Produ
It's $115 at Newegg and holds up to 4 x 1G of 184 pin DDR.
4 gigs isn't much, but for certain situations, like holding a small database with heavy use, they work great. For random I/O, they are obscenely fast for the price...about twice the speed of two striped Raptors with a good controller.
I'm not sure I'm too keen on Michael Crichton after his comments about global warming. I don't think gene patents are a swell idea, but I'm not sure I'd hold up Crichton as an authority on scientific matters.
Yes, because science works like a democracy. A bunch of us get together and vote on the laws of nature, and nature obeys. If you step out of line and promote a theory opposing "the consensus of the scientific community", then we burn you at the stake _and_ revoke your funding.
Trust us. It's better this way. Do you know how annoying it is when some uppity prick like Newton or Einstein comes along and claims that all the old theories are wrong? It really sucks when they manage to prove it, because the rest of us look like we're sitting there with our thumbs up our asses.
Global Warming is a celebrity field right now, and it will keep alot of us employed for a very long time. You can understand why we are a little protective of our sacred consensus, right?
He does say it's worthless. He says it's like a lame party where you drink alone and dance alone. He says that local multiplayer is the only good way to play multiplayer. The author is a tool. Go ahead, call me a moron and tell me I don't understand what I just read. You've already done it to someone else.
The author also completely ignores that online multiplayer is popular is because it's better than the alternatives.
Single player is far less compelling, as AI opponents get stale much faster. Local multiplayer is simply not practical in most situations.
Until my console fits on my keychain or IBM invests some serious effort into FPS bots (Deep Pwn, anyone?), I'll be resorting to playing online...not because it's perfect, but because it's more fun.
If you keep a dangerous instrumentality on your property, and it causes damage to others, you are liable for that if the harm is foreseeable.
That is only true if all responsible parties are held to a reasonable level of accountability.
If you found out that your oven was, without your knowledge, part of a local arson ring, you'd be pretty upset a being held accountable for the neighborhood damages. You'd probably blame Kenmore for making such a thing remotely possibly in the first place, since it has no connection with how or why you bought the oven in the first place.
Until the hardware mfgrs, OS mfgrs, software mfgrs, and users are all held to roughly similar standards, you can't place all blame on the user.
To put things a different way:
-If 1% of your products cause widespread damage, then 1% of your users are idiots.
-If 5% of your products cause widespread damage, then 5% of your users need training.
-If 25% of your products cause widespread damage, then you are the idiot.
He's a professor. Without professors, there is no university. With the possible exception of flooding the network so that it is unusable, he should be free to do anything he wants with the network.
Yes...and no...
In academic IT, there really is only one cardinal rule for users: do nothing that interferes with others' ability to use the network. Beyond that, as long as some behavior is remotely academics related, accommodations can be made. Is this professor interfering with the network? Indirectly, yes. He is circumventing essentially all of the tools IT can use to maintain the network's functionality. He is opening the university network to carrying traffic over which nobody in the university has control. He is, in effect, monopolizing the time of the university IT staff by being such a special case.
There are other ways of handling the situation. He could have his own private external connection, for example.
If a physics professor wanted to build a new wind tunnel that would be so loud it would disturb the other activies of the school, would it be an oppression of academic freedom to not allow it in the middle of campus? Build it somewhere else.
I think you both have VERY valid points. I think the GP poster, however, is pointing out that homosexuality by its own merit and/or purpose, cannot be a result of nature or natural selection (evolution)
Why? Because they don't reproduce? Explain the existence worker bees.
Gene propogation need not happen directly. An organism can also increase the representation of its own genes in future generations by promoting the reproductive success of relatives that carry similar genes.
Humans are highly social animals with small litters and they place extraordinarily high investments in single offspring. It's quite rational to theorize that a non-zero percentage of non-reproductive members in a family can improve the success of the family offspring simply by being available as a surrogate parent with out prior or potential commitment to children of their own.
From a Darwinian perspective, a homosexual would make a better replacement parent than a heterosexual, since should the reproductive one have children of their own, they would be, genetically speaking, more valuable offspring, and the heterosexual surrogates would have no genetic incentive to provide equal consideration to their nieces and nephews. The homosexual surrogate, however, would assign them equal genetic value.
I was born one mornin' when the sun didn't shine
...
I picked up my shovel and I walked to the mine
I loaded sixteen tons of number nine coal
And the straw boss said "Well, a-bless my soul"
You load sixteen tons, what do you get
Another day older and deeper in debt
Saint Peter don't you call me 'cause I can't go
I owe my soul to the company store
-Tennessee Ford, Sixteen Tons
there's a lot more in Massachusetts than just Boston, right?
You are referring to Rhode Island, right?
Not really. The courts require Mens Rea [wikipedia.org] before they can convict. No Mens Rea, no culpability, no crime. This is a basic requirement and can't be avoided (unless Russian corts are very, very weird). A bit on the scale of "No body, no crime".
i ct%20Liability%20Lecture%201.htm
That is false. Mens Rea does not apply in this case.
http://www.lawteacher.net/Criminal/Principles/Str
Infringing copyright is a strict-liability offence. The offender's state of mind is irrelevant in such offences. Well-known strict-liability offences include most traffic violations or statutory rape. It does not matter if you thought the parking space was legal or if you thought your partner was an adult...you are just as guilty either way.
On the other hand, you can't be punished for Mens Rea in a strict-liability offence. You cannot receive a ticket for "attempted speeding", no matter how hard you push that Yugo.
If a patient abuses a drug, or refuses to take the full course of drugs (in, say, a case of TB), is that the doctor's fault? There is only so much that a professional can do to mitigate against the stupidity of an end user. Perhaps password authentication is flawed, but I don't see you proposing a better solution. Perhaps BofA's system is fundamentally flawed, but I don't see you offering anything else. Regardless, at some point it is up to the user to protect their own interests by not taking 30 sleeping pills at a time, or giving out their passwords to other people.
If 60 of 67 patients fail to take the medicine, then yes, the "doctor", referring to the whole system, is completely at fault. There is little you can do about the greater fool at the tail of the bell curve, but when the majority of your users act in a particular fashion, that's not stupidity, it's normal behavior. As the "professional", it is your duty to foresee and accomodate the common uses of your product
Breaking & Entering
If the doors weren't locked, it isn't B&E. Unlawful Entry, perhaps, but unless something was damaged (eg the lock) in the entering process, it cannot be Breaking and Entering.
You are thinking of Forced Entry. The "breaking" in B&E refers too crossing the public/private line, i.e. "breaking the plane".
I mean consider an appropriate physical analogy for what this kid did. It would be like if he walked into a bookstore that looked to be open but turned out that the staff had taken the day off and gone home but forgot to lock up but then instead of stealing anything rearranged all the books so they spelled out funny comments and left a little note on the cash register suggesting they lock the store next time.
Breaking & Entering
Criminal Trespass
Burglary (even if nothing is stolen!)
Vandalism
Your little "joke" costs real money. The extra staff time required to resort and reinventory a medium-size bookstore is at least several thousand dollars. Just like keying cars, slashing tires, breaking windows, smashing mailboxes, etc., it's called being an asshole.
Obviously it isn't a good idea to release a javascript worm like this but it surely doesn't deserve more than community service and a good scolding. If the people in the system understood the technology it would do just that.
The "people in the system" understand technology far better than this kid. They understand that there are real people running these systems whose time is valuable, and when some idiot delinquent thinks he's being funny, he's the only one laughing.
Now you might argue that she is a customer that thats hardly justification. A more compelling argument is that its his job to never lose his cool and always be polite. So he'll get fired over this. Which is a shame because in my book he tried to do his job and dealt with an angry customer the right way. People don't like it when your firm and clear with them and want things sugar coated. She wasn't worth it.
She also doesn't know how to get things her way.
Never let your first point of contact with customer service escalate the call if the problem is actually your fault. Keep trying different avenues of approach until you hit the soft spot. Push for empathy, and don't blame anyone or anything. Use phrases like "I've really found myself in a bind here, and I'm not sure who can help me out." Note the important implications of "found myself"="could happen to anyone", "in a bind"="not quite life-or-death", "I'm not sure who"=easy handoff for the stonewallers, and "who can help me out"="obviously someone can help me". There will always be some eager trainee that doesn't know or a jaded short-timer that doesn't care about corporate policy. Let them be your hero. If possible, target the opposite sex.
If you still can't find a way in, then politely escalate the issue. Never mention how many times you contacted them or what the other contacts told you. That's the difference between desperation and nagging.
The problem with that approach I think, is that by the time you become a competent C++ programmer, you no longer have the ability to see things the same way a "newbie" does. I want tonnes and tonnes of options in my applications.
Being a competent programmer has almost no overlap with being a good user-interface designer. The problem is not "programmers can't think like newbies", it's "programmers think they can do UI because UI is just another part of the program." They can't.
Until the DE and app devs start realizing "oh shit, I have absolutely no clue what I'm doing with the interface, and I need to involve someone who does.", Linux won't ever crack the desktop market. XP and OSX are a decade ahead.
PS: Before you reply with "I'm a good programmer and a good UI designer", let me guess: you probably think you are a good driver too. These are just areas where people are notoriously inaccurate with self-assessment. Get a qualified second opinion.
Imagine your wife's grandma's heirloom china set is worth $400 on the market, but priceless to her. You have recently dropped one plate, and it's irreplaceable. The plate is worth $80 on the market. 6 months later, you see the plate on Ebay, drawing insipid bidding, reflecting relatively low demand, stuck at $40. Your web design business has been doing well, and you can afford $200 to get back in grace with your wife. You therefore bid $200, raising the current bid to $42. On the final day, you see a series of bids in , all by the same person, raising the price to $160. This is the point at which the shiller did not dare to raise the bid for fear of outbidding you.
The same trick works in reverse..you short-sell the very item you want to buy.
If that $40 plate is worth $200 dollars to you, you could make a new listing for it and bid $50. The real seller can no longer shill you up to $160, because, from his perspective, he's in competition with another seller. You'll have to eat the listing fees on a $50 item, but that's cheaper than what the shilling could cost you.
Just make sure that your listing closes after the original and you win the first auction. This covers you in case someone walks in at the last minute offering $10,000 on your listing...you'll actually have a plate to sell.
The damage is that this is fraud. And it does inflate prices on things you are trying to purchase. For example, if I want a something on eBay, and I put a bid of $100 on that. But the going rate is only $50, so my bid sits at $50. Then right before the auction ends, a shill bidder comes in, and jacks the price up to $95. I am now paying $95 for a product I should have rightly only paid $50 for!
If you are willing to pay $100 for the item, and the seller is willing to accept $100 for the item, then the market value of the item is $100. There is no "should have rightly only paid $50 for". If you are only willing to pay $50, don't bid $100.
Well let's assume you have a four-person household, and each person watches an average of 30 hours a week of TV. That's 6240 hours a year. If your cable bill is $720 a year, then that's about 11c per hour, or 6c for a half-hour show. It's effectively a 1700% markup.
An average of $0.06/per episode does not mean all shows are worth $0.06. The viewer could consider his few favorites worth $2 and all the rest to be worth $0.04. Claiming "It's effectively a 1700% markup." is meaningless, because people are only going to purchase the high-value content, not the 3AM infomercials.
There is another huge error in TFA:
36000 episodes per month at a mere $0.0014 each! If they take my suggestion, I'll be paying nearly 100 times more than that! How can they possibly go wrong! The maths don't lie!
The author assumes all TV programming is of equal value. People generally assign vastly different values to different shows. An individual could easily consider his favorite show to be worth more than $1.99/episode while still assigning a very low value to the same amount of programming selected randomly.