All Conservatives worship Adolf Hitler, Immortal Leader of their Race. They take bribes from Satan, and then spend them on crack whores and anthrax.
Everyone should be a winner in sports just for taking part.
The Supreme Court are simple minded village idiots. Why didn't they listen to me and my circle jerk buddy Larry? The fools!
I'm a Libertarian. Is that dolphin friendly tuna? Why do you hate our cetecean brothers, the proud dolphins? Black powah, bruthas!
Oh yeah, there was some other stuff about lunix and teh intarweb and stuff, but nothing that we haven't heard about a jillion times before, and he's only using it as a push up bra to sell his saggy dug story. I'm sure we'll all rush to get in our own views on Our Rights Online without bothering to read Doc's rant, but it's getting a bit boring taking part in the Slashdot circle jerk. Yes, eternal copy right bad, puppies good. Frankly I'd rather just skip the pretence that we've read the article, and just grill Doc on why he hates America so much.
Because when the planet killer starts to light up the sky, in the few remaining seconds/minutes/hours/days/months of our life, we can say "Why oh why didn't we give some more money to these guys instead of paying $70 billion so that Haliburton could build some more oil pipelines?"
Careful now. How about talking in terms of the probability of an impact tomorrow (hint: it's the same as the probability of an impact on any given day, including on a day when another rock drops), not in terms of the duration between impacts. Politicians are easily confused, especially around budget time, and might very well think that we're safe for the next X years.
(In Iraq, that is) is approaching $70 billion as I type. How much are we spending on finding, let alone planning to deal with, the real Weapon of Mass Destruction that the cosmos will - not might, will - lob at us sooner or later?
I'm just picturing Stacey Implants on Fox whooping and flashing her brights because we've assassinated Saddam bin Laden's great grandkids and Saved Civilization Yet Again, just as the planet killer is nuzzling it's way inside lunar orbit. Shudder.
They compared a constant bit rate encoding at one bit rate, and didn't compare it against mp3, mp3pro, ogg or wma?
Could they have found a way to make this test less interesting or useful? Who's the target audience here? The encoder developers? I'd have thought that they'd be doing their own tests.
Let's at least liven it up a bit. Guesses on the dupe story? I'm thinking seven hours, and Taco.
Sure. That's like comparing the range of Fords against each other, when what you really want to know is whether they whup Cheveys. If it's Ford (or an interested party) doing the comparison, well, I'm inclined to believe the opposite.
Daikatana? How everyone who was granted a preview said it looked to be amazing (gee whizz, I wonder if there's a connection) and it was only when it was released and the advertising money was already in the magazine's pockets that they declared that it sucked more than anything had ever sucked before?
I'm not saying that Doom 3 sucks. I'm just asking if you remember how much you believed that Daikatana didn't suck either.
In brief: let's wait for the reviews, rather than wetting our pants every time we get a sneak peek preview.
And how much does it cost to implement this system, to keep the records, and to handle the disputes that will inevitably arise? The micropayment administrator will pass those charges straight back on to merchants accepting micropayments, as well as their cut of the transaction. Is that going to be more or less than the merchant's own margin on each transaction?
Are we clear about the margins here? On each one cent transaction, how much of that will go on overheads for the administrator, on profit for the administrator, on overheads for the merchant, and on profit for the merchant? Say 0.25 cents each? Add a quarter of a cent to the admin costs of either administrator or merchant, and somebody doesn't pay their mortage this month.
I suspect that the problem with micropayments is that the numbers per transaction are so small, but the number of transactions are so high, that if you get your sums wrong even by a fraction of a cent, you have the potential to get royally screwed. That's find if you're burning venture capital money, but there's precious little of that around these days for outfits that don't have convincing plans, with sums based on evidence rather than guesses.
Mmm, yup. I worked in banking for years, and was struck by how much trust is involved in the banking system. Once you're "inside the firewall" as it were, you can pretty much request transfers to or from anywhere in the world, and it will generally happen first and then possibly get queried later. This wasn't so bad when it was big banks talking to big banks, but now that everybody and their 3 year old kids have credit cards, it's laughably easy to set yourself up as a merchant and get access to the system. That's why issuers just charge back to online merchants, because they know how untrustworthy this system is. It might be that the merchant is a victim, or it might be that the merchant themself is the scammer. Issuing chargebacks to scammed as well as scamming merchants is a form of insurance.
With micropayments, well, it's not even worth your time doing the chargeback. I suspect it's not even worth your time recording it. What are you going to do with the records? So are you just going to accept that you'll get scammed and soak the costs, with minimal margins? I doubt it.
$100? I don't have to disparage that, you've taken the fun out of it. That's a poor showing even in terms of sympathy donations from friends and family.
I'll stop eDonkeying and instead I'll pay to download high quality non-crippled licensed copies from the studios. Only thing is, I can't seem to find the link that lets me do that. It must be there, right?
Nah, only kidding. I live in the UK, so because of the need to translate movies in American English into films in British English, I often have to wait weeks or months before I can pay to see them on a big screen or DVD.
Except, of course, I don't, do I? I can just rip them off of teh intarweb. And sometimes with "Academy copy - do not distribute" popups. Clean your own house first, eh?
Yes, we can see the stick, MP[|RI]AA. Now, where's the carrot? You are granted exclusive copy rights so that you publish, not so that you can refrain from publishing. Publish or be damned.
I'll type slowly to make it easy for you. The investment in learning any particular OSS desktop or app suite or linux distro, let alone becoming familiar with the whole range of them, is far more than the dollar cost of buying a Windows distro plus Office. Yes, even at retail, let alone at actual OEM volume prices.
That said, I charge $50 an hour for my time. How much do your parents pay you to take out the trash?
> The people that want a specific candy bar will pay for it if it means they can't get that candy bar otherwise.
Speculation, and I assert otherwise. Find a counter example.
>Just because something's free doesn't mean you want it, as plenty of ugly couches left on the curbside with "FREE!" signs on them can attest.
Have you ever moved a couch? That's a high transaction cost, not a free one. Notice how I talked about the cost of negotiating the transaction, not the dollar value of it. Find a better counter example.
>Obviously, some people won't pay for anything. But many will, especially to support the artists they like.
Sure, that $109.30 for U2 will really persuade them to go indie, and the $10 for Linkin Park shows just how much you wacky kids will pay for your college boy rawk.
You support how many users? Twenty? Fifty? With how many colleages? None? A Pimply Faced Youth? In what kind of operation?
I'm not trolling, I'm genuinely interested. I work in a development shop that uses linux and windows machines pretty much interchangeably. We're agnostic, and just use the best tool to get the job done. For some development, that's linux. For some development, it's Windows (find me drivers and apps for multiple USB bluetooth dongles and I might switch). For all "office productivity" tasks, it's Windows. The tech guys prefer installing Windows because it's harder to buy incompatible hardware (notice how carefully I worded that?) and easier to just image machines from a generic install image with a fair degree of confidence that they'll either work or will reconfigure themselves on first boot. Virus checking is a problem, but manageable, and Windows Update kicks the snot out of any linux distro update that I've seen so far (Red Hat, debian, SuSE).
That said, I've got a new laptop that needs WinXP Home purged from it. I'll try putting Mandrake along side XP Pro and see if I change my mind.
In principle I agree with you that it should be that way, and I do fully accept that GPL defaults to copyright even if it fails the contract test, but perhaps I'm viewing it from a different point of view.
Specifically, I'm not saying that you're wrong, because there's nothing in findlaw either way, but I am saying that it would take a brave person to pay their mortage on the basis of the GPL being a non-revokable binding contract.
We really could do with some case law precendent on this to clear up whether the GPL binds (contract) as well as empowers (license). I hope that SCO will finally provide us with one.
When you contest payment with your bank, what happens? Well, you talk to an actual live human being, who will do actual human things, and make a decision on whether to refund you the money and whether to prosecute a third party. And your transaction fees pay his salary.
What happens when you contest something with PayPal? You drop them an email (good luck trying to talk to anyone), and then they freeze your account, sieze (i.e. spend) your money, and (if they're feeling particularly communicative) tell you to go screw yourself. They do that not because they're evil (although they probably are) but because they simply don't make enough margin on their transactions to be able to afford to investigate them, and because they know that it's not worth anyone's time to sue them, even in small claims court, for the contested amounts.
Now, when the transaction value drops to 1 cent, what's the best case margin on that? You've got purchase and maintenance costs on your servers and database, plus bandwidth costs for those 128bit SSL encrypted transaction details that fly both ways. Half a cent? More if you handle a lot. A loss if you don't handle enough to amortize your setup costs.
Now, how many fraudulent transactions do you have to have - from a single source - before it's worth taking any action? It costs ten cents for a staffer to click on a button, so you're talking twenty transactions. If the staffer has to think at all, it's a hundred. If they have to do any investigatation at all - for example, to decide if a bunch of transactions are from a single source - it's thousands. If you want to hand it over to a lawyer or other third party, it's tens or hundreds of thousands.
But that's fantasy land, because it's not worth even recording the details of the transaction that would allow you to decide if it was fraudulent or not. The logs themslves would take a huge chunk out of your profit. You'd simply have to trust the referrer.
But if it's not worth your while even retaining transaction records for micropayments, or to investigate fraud after the fact, how are you going to protect themselves from fraud?
I suspect that you're not. It comes down to the equation of whether it's worth anyone's time to crack the system. Well, as thousands of open source projects, white hat hobbyist hackers, and karma systems show, lots of people don't put a dollar value on their time. And given that the chances of being caught are minimal, well, why not give it a go? After all, it's only avoiding a penny a time. Who can that hurt?
Any popular micropayment system will (I suggest) be defrauded, and the costs will come right out of the payment backer's pocket. We've seen how PayPal deals with that; ignore it. Don't answer the 'phones. Freeze the account, and spend the money in it. With micropayments, who's going to even bother complaining? And if they do, how much are they going to have in their account? $5? It's barely even worthwhile seizing that, and not worthwhile at all if you have to send or even read a letter.
There is simply no compelling reason for anyone to manage micropayments, other than as a tool of desperation to prop up a flagging or non-existent business model (*cough* slashdot *cough*). There's precious little profit to be made from it, and a lot of opportunity to be scammed so badly that you won't even realise that you're bankrupt until you total the figures at the end of the year and find out that most of your payments came from Mr M. Mouse.
I suspect that it's good old fashioned economics that are stopping any of the big financial institutions from implementing mi
Yup, good point about competition, cartels, and simplicity in pricing. I switched from paying ~£15 a month in voice calls bills to paying £16 flat rate to anywhere in the UK.
The joke is that my usage has since gone up, but I'm damn sure that my telco is still denying themselves the potential cost savings by metering the calls (just not billing me for them). After all, how will they know how much they're losing unless they pay to count it?
>Visa and Mastercard. I suspect that they are just treading water until there is a whiff of possible competition, at which point they will swoop in together make MicroPayments happen between them.
Why? Wouldn't they rather just watch their competitors commit suicide by a thousand cuts as they piss away dollars of human time on resolving disputes over penny transactions?
One reason that credit card fraud is so rampant is that it's not worth anybody's time chasing up sums less than $30. When the sums drop below 5 cents, it's hardly even worth recording them. Micropayments are the black hats dream. Free access to premium content, with no practical chance of being caught out, because tracking down any individual case of fraud isn't worth the salary of the person doing it.
> "No one will buy a candy bar for 50 cents because they will be paralyzed by the user overhead." And, of course, we know this wrong. The candy industry (just to give an example) makes millions of dollars of profit a year selling 50 cent candy bars.
Because nobody gives away candy bars. If shops were full of shelves full of candy bars saying "please take some", how many people would choose to negotiate the purchase of a 50 cent bar?
Slashdot Mirror
Oh yeah, there was some other stuff about lunix and teh intarweb and stuff, but nothing that we haven't heard about a jillion times before, and he's only using it as a push up bra to sell his saggy dug story. I'm sure we'll all rush to get in our own views on Our Rights Online without bothering to read Doc's rant, but it's getting a bit boring taking part in the Slashdot circle jerk. Yes, eternal copy right bad, puppies good. Frankly I'd rather just skip the pretence that we've read the article, and just grill Doc on why he hates America so much.
Black powah, bruthas!
> Unfortunately, Perpendicular movement with respect to the Earth is required to even detect these asteroids.
Only at ranges beyond the atmosphere. Er, oops.
Not to worry, the Lord Kelvin will protect us, if we just have faith. Huzzah for Kelvinmass!
Because when the planet killer starts to light up the sky, in the few remaining seconds/minutes/hours/days/months of our life, we can say "Why oh why didn't we give some more money to these guys instead of paying $70 billion so that Haliburton could build some more oil pipelines?"
Careful now. How about talking in terms of the probability of an impact tomorrow (hint: it's the same as the probability of an impact on any given day, including on a day when another rock drops), not in terms of the duration between impacts. Politicians are easily confused, especially around budget time, and might very well think that we're safe for the next X years.
>It is far easier to deflect something millions of miles away, than it is when it is 4 minutes from impact.
Not as dramatic though. Heck, we could shoot Pvt Jessica Lynch up there, and that would guarantee an intervention.
(In Iraq, that is) is approaching $70 billion as I type. How much are we spending on finding, let alone planning to deal with, the real Weapon of Mass Destruction that the cosmos will - not might, will - lob at us sooner or later?
I'm just picturing Stacey Implants on Fox whooping and flashing her brights because we've assassinated Saddam bin Laden's great grandkids and Saved Civilization Yet Again, just as the planet killer is nuzzling it's way inside lunar orbit. Shudder.
They compared a constant bit rate encoding at one bit rate, and didn't compare it against mp3, mp3pro, ogg or wma?
Could they have found a way to make this test less interesting or useful? Who's the target audience here? The encoder developers? I'd have thought that they'd be doing their own tests.
Let's at least liven it up a bit. Guesses on the dupe story? I'm thinking seven hours, and Taco.
Sure. That's like comparing the range of Fords against each other, when what you really want to know is whether they whup Cheveys. If it's Ford (or an interested party) doing the comparison, well, I'm inclined to believe the opposite.
Daikatana? How everyone who was granted a preview said it looked to be amazing (gee whizz, I wonder if there's a connection) and it was only when it was released and the advertising money was already in the magazine's pockets that they declared that it sucked more than anything had ever sucked before?
I'm not saying that Doom 3 sucks. I'm just asking if you remember how much you believed that Daikatana didn't suck either.
In brief: let's wait for the reviews, rather than wetting our pants every time we get a sneak peek preview.
And how much does it cost to implement this system, to keep the records, and to handle the disputes that will inevitably arise? The micropayment administrator will pass those charges straight back on to merchants accepting micropayments, as well as their cut of the transaction. Is that going to be more or less than the merchant's own margin on each transaction?
Are we clear about the margins here? On each one cent transaction, how much of that will go on overheads for the administrator, on profit for the administrator, on overheads for the merchant, and on profit for the merchant? Say 0.25 cents each? Add a quarter of a cent to the admin costs of either administrator or merchant, and somebody doesn't pay their mortage this month.
I suspect that the problem with micropayments is that the numbers per transaction are so small, but the number of transactions are so high, that if you get your sums wrong even by a fraction of a cent, you have the potential to get royally screwed. That's find if you're burning venture capital money, but there's precious little of that around these days for outfits that don't have convincing plans, with sums based on evidence rather than guesses.
Mmm, yup. I worked in banking for years, and was struck by how much trust is involved in the banking system. Once you're "inside the firewall" as it were, you can pretty much request transfers to or from anywhere in the world, and it will generally happen first and then possibly get queried later. This wasn't so bad when it was big banks talking to big banks, but now that everybody and their 3 year old kids have credit cards, it's laughably easy to set yourself up as a merchant and get access to the system. That's why issuers just charge back to online merchants, because they know how untrustworthy this system is. It might be that the merchant is a victim, or it might be that the merchant themself is the scammer. Issuing chargebacks to scammed as well as scamming merchants is a form of insurance.
With micropayments, well, it's not even worth your time doing the chargeback. I suspect it's not even worth your time recording it. What are you going to do with the records? So are you just going to accept that you'll get scammed and soak the costs, with minimal margins? I doubt it.
No, you relax. Just back the fuck away from the keyboard. Yeah.
$100? I don't have to disparage that, you've taken the fun out of it. That's a poor showing even in terms of sympathy donations from friends and family.
I'll stop eDonkeying and instead I'll pay to download high quality non-crippled licensed copies from the studios. Only thing is, I can't seem to find the link that lets me do that. It must be there, right?
Nah, only kidding. I live in the UK, so because of the need to translate movies in American English into films in British English, I often have to wait weeks or months before I can pay to see them on a big screen or DVD.
Except, of course, I don't, do I? I can just rip them off of teh intarweb. And sometimes with "Academy copy - do not distribute" popups. Clean your own house first, eh?
Yes, we can see the stick, MP[|RI]AA. Now, where's the carrot? You are granted exclusive copy rights so that you publish, not so that you can refrain from publishing. Publish or be damned.
I'll type slowly to make it easy for you. The investment in learning any particular OSS desktop or app suite or linux distro, let alone becoming familiar with the whole range of them, is far more than the dollar cost of buying a Windows distro plus Office. Yes, even at retail, let alone at actual OEM volume prices.
That said, I charge $50 an hour for my time. How much do your parents pay you to take out the trash?
> The people that want a specific candy bar will pay for it if it means they can't get that candy bar otherwise.
Speculation, and I assert otherwise. Find a counter example.
>Just because something's free doesn't mean you want it, as plenty of ugly couches left on the curbside with "FREE!" signs on them can attest.
Have you ever moved a couch? That's a high transaction cost, not a free one. Notice how I talked about the cost of negotiating the transaction, not the dollar value of it. Find a better counter example.
>Obviously, some people won't pay for anything. But many will, especially to support the artists they like.
Sure, that $109.30 for U2 will really persuade them to go indie, and the $10 for Linkin Park shows just how much you wacky kids will pay for your college boy rawk.
Heh, how much have you paid?
Heh heh, "troll". Do I detect the moderation of someone who paid to read this duplicate? That's so cute.
You support how many users? Twenty? Fifty? With how many colleages? None? A Pimply Faced Youth? In what kind of operation?
I'm not trolling, I'm genuinely interested. I work in a development shop that uses linux and windows machines pretty much interchangeably. We're agnostic, and just use the best tool to get the job done. For some development, that's linux. For some development, it's Windows (find me drivers and apps for multiple USB bluetooth dongles and I might switch). For all "office productivity" tasks, it's Windows. The tech guys prefer installing Windows because it's harder to buy incompatible hardware (notice how carefully I worded that?) and easier to just image machines from a generic install image with a fair degree of confidence that they'll either work or will reconfigure themselves on first boot. Virus checking is a problem, but manageable, and Windows Update kicks the snot out of any linux distro update that I've seen so far (Red Hat, debian, SuSE).
That said, I've got a new laptop that needs WinXP Home purged from it. I'll try putting Mandrake along side XP Pro and see if I change my mind.
In principle I agree with you that it should be that way, and I do fully accept that GPL defaults to copyright even if it fails the contract test, but perhaps I'm viewing it from a different point of view.
Specifically, I'm not saying that you're wrong, because there's nothing in findlaw either way, but I am saying that it would take a brave person to pay their mortage on the basis of the GPL being a non-revokable binding contract.
We really could do with some case law precendent on this to clear up whether the GPL binds (contract) as well as empowers (license). I hope that SCO will finally provide us with one.
Yes, yes, roll out the old Win9x jokes. WinNT/2K/XP has been out for quite some time now.
When you contest payment with your bank, what happens? Well, you talk to an actual live human being, who will do actual human things, and make a decision on whether to refund you the money and whether to prosecute a third party. And your transaction fees pay his salary.
What happens when you contest something with PayPal? You drop them an email (good luck trying to talk to anyone), and then they freeze your account, sieze (i.e. spend) your money, and (if they're feeling particularly communicative) tell you to go screw yourself. They do that not because they're evil (although they probably are) but because they simply don't make enough margin on their transactions to be able to afford to investigate them, and because they know that it's not worth anyone's time to sue them, even in small claims court, for the contested amounts.
Now, when the transaction value drops to 1 cent, what's the best case margin on that? You've got purchase and maintenance costs on your servers and database, plus bandwidth costs for those 128bit SSL encrypted transaction details that fly both ways. Half a cent? More if you handle a lot. A loss if you don't handle enough to amortize your setup costs.
Now, how many fraudulent transactions do you have to have - from a single source - before it's worth taking any action? It costs ten cents for a staffer to click on a button, so you're talking twenty transactions. If the staffer has to think at all, it's a hundred. If they have to do any investigatation at all - for example, to decide if a bunch of transactions are from a single source - it's thousands. If you want to hand it over to a lawyer or other third party, it's tens or hundreds of thousands.
But that's fantasy land, because it's not worth even recording the details of the transaction that would allow you to decide if it was fraudulent or not. The logs themslves would take a huge chunk out of your profit. You'd simply have to trust the referrer.
Well, that's not working out too well for credit cards right now, but at least cc issuers can pass back all the costs to online retailers for credit card fraud.
But if it's not worth your while even retaining transaction records for micropayments, or to investigate fraud after the fact, how are you going to protect themselves from fraud?
I suspect that you're not. It comes down to the equation of whether it's worth anyone's time to crack the system. Well, as thousands of open source projects, white hat hobbyist hackers, and karma systems show, lots of people don't put a dollar value on their time. And given that the chances of being caught are minimal, well, why not give it a go? After all, it's only avoiding a penny a time. Who can that hurt?
Any popular micropayment system will (I suggest) be defrauded, and the costs will come right out of the payment backer's pocket. We've seen how PayPal deals with that; ignore it. Don't answer the 'phones. Freeze the account, and spend the money in it. With micropayments, who's going to even bother complaining? And if they do, how much are they going to have in their account? $5? It's barely even worthwhile seizing that, and not worthwhile at all if you have to send or even read a letter.
There is simply no compelling reason for anyone to manage micropayments, other than as a tool of desperation to prop up a flagging or non-existent business model (*cough* slashdot *cough*). There's precious little profit to be made from it, and a lot of opportunity to be scammed so badly that you won't even realise that you're bankrupt until you total the figures at the end of the year and find out that most of your payments came from Mr M. Mouse.
I suspect that it's good old fashioned economics that are stopping any of the big financial institutions from implementing mi
Yup, good point about competition, cartels, and simplicity in pricing. I switched from paying ~£15 a month in voice calls bills to paying £16 flat rate to anywhere in the UK.
The joke is that my usage has since gone up, but I'm damn sure that my telco is still denying themselves the potential cost savings by metering the calls (just not billing me for them). After all, how will they know how much they're losing unless they pay to count it?
>Visa and Mastercard. I suspect that they are just treading water until there is a whiff of possible competition, at which point they will swoop in together make MicroPayments happen between them.
Why? Wouldn't they rather just watch their competitors commit suicide by a thousand cuts as they piss away dollars of human time on resolving disputes over penny transactions?
One reason that credit card fraud is so rampant is that it's not worth anybody's time chasing up sums less than $30. When the sums drop below 5 cents, it's hardly even worth recording them. Micropayments are the black hats dream. Free access to premium content, with no practical chance of being caught out, because tracking down any individual case of fraud isn't worth the salary of the person doing it.
> "No one will buy a candy bar for 50 cents because they will be paralyzed by the user overhead." And, of course, we know this wrong. The candy industry (just to give an example) makes millions of dollars of profit a year selling 50 cent candy bars.
Because nobody gives away candy bars. If shops were full of shelves full of candy bars saying "please take some", how many people would choose to negotiate the purchase of a 50 cent bar?