I'm confused as to why anyone needs to provide ANY reason why someone didn't get hired. Getting fired is a separate issue. You need documentation to back up the decision, etc, etc. But hiring someone? Heck, just because you turn in an application and have an interview doesn't mean you've got the job, especially in this economy when there are 100 applicants applying for a single position. The chances are very good that you won't get it, even if they love you.
He mentioned the pricing would be covered in a followup article. In a nutshell however, I'd imagine that $28 is the sweet spot for the game to maximize the profits. Sell it for less, you won't sufficiently increase the number of sales. Sell it for more, and nobody will buy it.
As for tapering off the price after the first few months, he says he's still selling copies of it, even after a few years. I'm sure he's factored in the likely effectiveness of lowering the price and determined he'll make more money by keeping it at the original price. It's possible he's tried tapering the price off on earlier products only to see no substantial increase in sales as a result.
The fans are buying it anyway. The pirates are pirating it anyway. Neither one is likely to change their ways, and the pirates, faced with the choice of paying or not being able to play, would likely choose the latter anyway. It's also possible he has good numbers on the number of pirated copies in the wild. It doesn't take much for an installation to phone home for statistical purposes.
I think the most interesting part of the article is that he doesn't even know why people pay for it at all. However, because they do, he will continue to provide them with more of what they're willing to pay for. Sure he could spend time and money improving the graphics, but if it won't increase his profit margin, why bother?
You can't pirate your physical presence at a show. Sure, you can record and pirate the audio from that show, in fact, you can even camcorder it, or purchase and pirate an official video/audio recording of the show, but none of that replaces actually BEING there. If you were content to just listen to the music, the show itself would be of no consequence to you anyway.
The employee is already paid less than the agency. That profit margin is built in. So yes, if the agency gets cut 10%, the employee's rate will also probably get cut 10%. Only if the agency is trying to maintain the same dollar profit per person will the employee get the more serious cut. That in turn ultimately depends on the contract the employee has with the agency in the first place. However, if you're a temp worker to begin with, you're used to things like this. The whole point of a temporary worker is that they are TEMPORARY. Their status of employment and/or salary can change at any time.
The company I work for canned all the temp workers a couple months ago. In the middle of a shift no less. The fact that Microsoft is still using them is strange by itself. If all they're asking for is a 10% reduction in pay, that's probably a pretty reasonable concession. The alternative is not likely to be much of an improvement.
Why even work it out after the fact. Work it out before. State that you'll be perfectly happy to work extra hours as needed, provided that appropriate compensation of one form or another is provided. Either extra pay, extra hours off, or comp time that works into extra vacation.
Seriously though, it's a free service. They're not required to back it up, they're not required to maintain your data. I'm pretty sure the terms of service consist of a list of restrictions for the user and a whole lot of "we're not responsible for anything!" on the part of the provider. So there you go. They're not responsible for anything, including warning you that your data is about to be purged. Keep a local backup if you want it saved for a year.
Breaking a window or kicking in the door alerts the legitimate owner that an intrusion has taken place, whereas if the door were left unlocked, someone might be able to enter, take something, and leave and the theft might not be noticed for a long time. And then you're debating if it were really stolen or just misplaced. By the time you start really investigating, the trail is cold.
Having another customer get ahold of sensitive documents might not be preventable, but if you know when and how the illicit transfer took place, that might be enough incentive to prevent it from happening in the first place.
How you would accomplish this though, as questioned by the submitter, is still up for grabs.
They already know where he was, he told them. He was IN THE CAR. The question is whether or not he stole the car, or was just getting a ride from whoever had stolen the car and had no idea it was stolen. If in fact he's telling the truth, the only likely alibi he could have would be the actual thief. He probably shouldn't bank on THAT guy showing up to testify on his behalf.:)
Nobody is going to get convicted based on a mosquito. If he's convicted, it'll be based on the testimony he gave that he was in fact in the car. The mosquito would only come into play if the defense tries to claim there was no probable cause to question him in the first place..
If he hadn't admitted being in the car, or claimed otherwise, THEN the blood sample from the mosquito would play into court during the trial, and yes, without additional forensic evidence (fingerprints, etc), it's unlikely the mosquito alone would be sufficient to convict him.
It was enough to question the guy, who admitted having been in the car, so the mosquito has proven to be a positive lead. Of course, the mosquito does not explain WHY the guy was in the car, but he could have left behind his wallet with ID and still used the same story.
Simple solution, check outgoing packets. If you're an ISP and the packet doesn't show that it originated from within your network, drop it. No, I'm not talking about backbone providers, but the zombie windows boxes won't be able to forge the from headers on packets. That doesn't necessarily stop a botnet, but it makes each infected machine extremely easy to track down during an attack, and easy to filter out at the victim's end.... or am I missing something obvious here?
First off, as a general rule, most criminals are not exactly the smartest bunch in the lot. They just have to be smart enough to avoid getting caught enough times to make the risk/reward ratio pay off. Yes, there's a chance the police will catch up to you, and also a chance that a homeowner will fill you full of holes. You weigh that against the(unfortunately) very likely chance that you will get away with it.
Depending on the influences of the criminal, there will be varying degrees of risk that he will be willing to endure for his activities. Take someone who's smart, who carefully cases his targets, ensures the owners won't be home and a lack of credible potential witnesses, knows how to cover his tracks, keeps his mouth shut, and knows when to quit. This criminal will accept far less risk than a broke cokehead on the verge of withdrawl. The cokehead might not even care if the owner might have a gun. Probably doesn't even care if he KNOWS the owner has a gun. He'll still go for it.
So yes, guns won't stop all crime. Just like the death penalty won't stop murders. However, they do give the owner the capability of defending himself, family, and property that he wouldn't have otherwise.
What the Castle Doctrine defense offers the owner is the lack of hesitation. While you're preparing to pull the trigger, you don't want to have to take time out to consider if you should wait until your assailant takes one more step toward you so he won't fall outside of the house, or make sure he's directly facing you so you won't accidentally shoot him in the back. It makes the rules you have to follow in a crisis situation much simpler and much easier to prove you were following those rules in good faith.
There are three basic ways to make millions of dollars.
1. Win the lotto.... with a ticket YOU purchased LOCALLY.
2. Inheritance.
3. Many years of hard work, sound financial wisdom, and a bit of luck.
Any other way to make that much money is not likely to be legal, and very likely to not work at all.
That being said, if you're content to break the law anyway, there are easier and safer ways to make that money than sending a fortune of your own money to some stranger overseas.
Yes, but to do this properly would generally require someone to have access to the internal programming of the banking system. Making 1 cent transactions might be possible, but they will certainly show up and be more noticeable than if 1 cent just disappeared from the balance. If your account has 200 transactions a month and carries a balance over $20000, you're only going to try to balance that so many times before you give up trying to find the penny. Heck, you could lose a dollar or two at that rate and likely get away with it. But the importance of this method is that the actual transaction doesn't show up.
Then again... if you could find a way to disguise the transaction as a fee, it would likely get overlooked as well.:)
But I don't want to be a farmer, plowing fields with rocks, hoping to save enough extra to survive the winter, and hoping I don't catch some fatal disease so I can live until I'm at least into my 40s.
Yes, I could live without it if I had to. But I don't want to, and I'm guessing that nobody else wants to either. We can't go back, and we can't stay where we are, so we only go forward.
But if it will put your mind at ease, you can be contented in the fact that 10 years from now, there will likely be some new electronic gadget that nobody can live without which will annoy us far worse than cellphones or ipods ever did.
Well, most hosting providers actually expect their customers to use a significant amount of the bandwidth they provide, and enforce quotas when reached. If a customer used 100% of their allocated bandwidth they would at most be cut off for the duration of their payment period, or given the option to purchase additional bandwidth. This isn't like a cable company offering "unlimited" bandwidth and retroactively redefining the meaning of unlimited.
Some people spend more than that a month on their car... others drive a 10 year old car and have no payments. The money isn't that hard to come by if you want to spend it badly enough. The real question, is what you're spending it on actually worth it?
Interest only loans exist for perfectly good reasons. They just aren't good reasons when applied to something like a home mortgage, that you're SUPPOSED to pay off over time. Consider a business line of credit. Lets say I run a business which I want to expand. This will require me to carry debt for a short period of time. Commercial paper is what they call it, but an interest only loan is basically what we're talking about here. I do something, or sell something that has an expense to create. I need to spend the money now but it'll be 30, or 60, or 90 days before I get paid for it. So fine, in 90 days I'll get paid, and it will cost me say $10 to produce the product and $2 in interest, but I'll make $15 once it gets paid off. When the choices are make $3 or make $0 becuase I can't afford to produce it in the first place, it makes sense. So it's going to take 90 days to get paid, but in 30 days, I need to crank out another product. That means more loans. In fact, that means I'll virtually ALWAYS have a loan out, which I'm paying interest on all the time, but never paying off. Of course, I could use my profits to pay down the debt, and if I'm not growing, requiring further up front expenses, then I certainly will pay it down. But for a company that's growing, a long term interest only loan makes perfect sense, as it provides them with the ability to make money. The bank certainly has no problem with it.
The difference here is, a house that you're living in doesn't make any money. At least, it's not supposed to. Oh sure, if you maintain it well it shouldn't lose any value, and if you spend $40k to add on a couple rooms, it might increase in value proportionately, but you're doing good if you sell your house for 6% more than you bought it for. Just enough extra to pay off the realestate agents and not consider it a loss.
All of that changes though when you consider that a house might increase in value, not because it generates revenue, but because the housing market in your area increases and suddenly your house is worth more... just because it is. The bank now thinks that this is safe collateral on a interest free loan as they'd be able to recover their investment through a foreclosure. That's why we had a subprime mess to begin with. The banks simply didn't care if the owner could pay the loan back as the house would be worth more later anyway.
There's another way to look at it. Interest payments on home mortgages are tax deductible. If you're constantly carrying around $20k in credit card debt, it makes perfect sense to refinance your home and pay that off. First off, you'd have a lower interest rate, and secondly, interest payments on the cards were not tax deductible and now those payments are. So if you're the type that's sitting with maxed out credit cards and you keep them maxed out, it might just make sense to transfer that debt to your mortgage, cut up the cards, and make interest only payments and pay cash for everything else for now on. Of course, that represents and requires a level of responsibility that you're probably not going to be able to live up to in the long run, and ultimately that's a big part of the problem. If people were more fiscally responsible in the first place, didn't purchase beyond their means, everything would be perfectly peachy right now.
I don't think we've lost faith in the stock markets. The public said the same thing back in 2001, and yet the market recovered to drop again another day. It happens. There are tons of people right now insisting that people have given up on the market while there's a (probably smaller group), who's patiently waiting with a pile of cash for the market to hit bottom so they can take advantage of the glorious opportunity that has been presented to them. The stock market is a long term game. Those who play it in the short term might as well stick to card counting at blackjack. The odds of coming out ahead are about the same and it takes a lot less time to get good at it.
The only way to lose in the long term would be if the economy totally crashed and never recovered. In that case, it wouldn't matter if you won or lost, so you wouldn't ever want to bet on that eventuality.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm confused as to why anyone needs to provide ANY reason why someone didn't get hired. Getting fired is a separate issue. You need documentation to back up the decision, etc, etc. But hiring someone? Heck, just because you turn in an application and have an interview doesn't mean you've got the job, especially in this economy when there are 100 applicants applying for a single position. The chances are very good that you won't get it, even if they love you.
-Restil
I thought the secret service was responsible for that particular debacle...
I'm just posting to get the achievement. Don't mind me. ;)
-Restil
He mentioned the pricing would be covered in a followup article. In a nutshell however, I'd imagine that $28 is the sweet spot for the game to maximize the profits. Sell it for less, you won't sufficiently increase the number of sales. Sell it for more, and nobody will buy it.
As for tapering off the price after the first few months, he says he's still selling copies of it, even after a few years. I'm sure he's factored in the likely effectiveness of lowering the price and determined he'll make more money by keeping it at the original price. It's possible he's tried tapering the price off on earlier products only to see no substantial increase in sales as a result.
The fans are buying it anyway. The pirates are pirating it anyway. Neither one is likely to change their ways, and the pirates, faced with the choice of paying or not being able to play, would likely choose the latter anyway. It's also possible he has good numbers on the number of pirated copies in the wild. It doesn't take much for an installation to phone home for statistical purposes.
I think the most interesting part of the article is that he doesn't even know why people pay for it at all. However, because they do, he will continue to provide them with more of what they're willing to pay for. Sure he could spend time and money improving the graphics, but if it won't increase his profit margin, why bother?
-Restil
You can't pirate your physical presence at a show. Sure, you can record and pirate the audio from that show, in fact, you can even camcorder it, or purchase and pirate an official video/audio recording of the show, but none of that replaces actually BEING there. If you were content to just listen to the music, the show itself would be of no consequence to you anyway.
The employee is already paid less than the agency. That profit margin is built in. So yes, if the agency gets cut 10%, the employee's rate will also probably get cut 10%. Only if the agency is trying to maintain the same dollar profit per person will the employee get the more serious cut. That in turn ultimately depends on the contract the employee has with the agency in the first place. However, if you're a temp worker to begin with, you're used to things like this. The whole point of a temporary worker is that they are TEMPORARY. Their status of employment and/or salary can change at any time.
The company I work for canned all the temp workers a couple months ago. In the middle of a shift no less. The fact that Microsoft is still using them is strange by itself. If all they're asking for is a 10% reduction in pay, that's probably a pretty reasonable concession. The alternative is not likely to be much of an improvement.
-Restil
An even more basic idea....
Don't carry child porn on a laptop through an airport terminal... or anywhere else for that matter.
"quite a bit" not "an awful lot".
Yes, I know, it's sad that I know that.
-Restil
Why even work it out after the fact. Work it out before. State that you'll be perfectly happy to work extra hours as needed, provided that appropriate compensation of one form or another is provided. Either extra pay, extra hours off, or comp time that works into extra vacation.
-Restil
Seriously though, it's a free service. They're not required to back it up, they're not required to maintain your data. I'm pretty sure the terms of service consist of a list of restrictions for the user and a whole lot of "we're not responsible for anything!" on the part of the provider. So there you go. They're not responsible for anything, including warning you that your data is about to be purged. Keep a local backup if you want it saved for a year.
-Restil
Breaking a window or kicking in the door alerts the legitimate owner that an intrusion has taken place, whereas if the door were left unlocked, someone might be able to enter, take something, and leave and the theft might not be noticed for a long time. And then you're debating if it were really stolen or just misplaced. By the time you start really investigating, the trail is cold.
Having another customer get ahold of sensitive documents might not be preventable, but if you know when and how the illicit transfer took place, that might be enough incentive to prevent it from happening in the first place.
How you would accomplish this though, as questioned by the submitter, is still up for grabs.
-Restil
They already know where he was, he told them. He was IN THE CAR. The question is whether or not he stole the car, or was just getting a ride from whoever had stolen the car and had no idea it was stolen. If in fact he's telling the truth, the only likely alibi he could have would be the actual thief. He probably shouldn't bank on THAT guy showing up to testify on his behalf. :)
-Restil
Nobody is going to get convicted based on a mosquito. If he's convicted, it'll be based on the testimony he gave that he was in fact in the car. The mosquito would only come into play if the defense tries to claim there was no probable cause to question him in the first place..
If he hadn't admitted being in the car, or claimed otherwise, THEN the blood sample from the mosquito would play into court during the trial, and yes, without additional forensic evidence (fingerprints, etc), it's unlikely the mosquito alone would be sufficient to convict him.
-Restil
It was enough to question the guy, who admitted having been in the car, so the mosquito has proven to be a positive lead. Of course, the mosquito does not explain WHY the guy was in the car, but he could have left behind his wallet with ID and still used the same story.
-Restil
Not forbidden... just stupid.
-Restil
You would only need 97.
-Restil
Simple solution, check outgoing packets. If you're an ISP and the packet doesn't show that it originated from within your network, drop it. No, I'm not talking about backbone providers, but the zombie windows boxes won't be able to forge the from headers on packets. That doesn't necessarily stop a botnet, but it makes each infected machine extremely easy to track down during an attack, and easy to filter out at the victim's end. ... or am I missing something obvious here?
-Restil
First off, as a general rule, most criminals are not exactly the smartest bunch in the lot. They just have to be smart enough to avoid getting caught enough times to make the risk/reward ratio pay off. Yes, there's a chance the police will catch up to you, and also a chance that a homeowner will fill you full of holes. You weigh that against the(unfortunately) very likely chance that you will get away with it.
Depending on the influences of the criminal, there will be varying degrees of risk that he will be willing to endure for his activities. Take someone who's smart, who carefully cases his targets, ensures the owners won't be home and a lack of credible potential witnesses, knows how to cover his tracks, keeps his mouth shut, and knows when to quit. This criminal will accept far less risk than a broke cokehead on the verge of withdrawl. The cokehead might not even care if the owner might have a gun. Probably doesn't even care if he KNOWS the owner has a gun. He'll still go for it.
So yes, guns won't stop all crime. Just like the death penalty won't stop murders. However, they do give the owner the capability of defending himself, family, and property that he wouldn't have otherwise.
What the Castle Doctrine defense offers the owner is the lack of hesitation. While you're preparing to pull the trigger, you don't want to have to take time out to consider if you should wait until your assailant takes one more step toward you so he won't fall outside of the house, or make sure he's directly facing you so you won't accidentally shoot him in the back. It makes the rules you have to follow in a crisis situation much simpler and much easier to prove you were following those rules in good faith.
-Restil
There are three basic ways to make millions of dollars.
1. Win the lotto .... with a ticket YOU purchased LOCALLY.
2. Inheritance.
3. Many years of hard work, sound financial wisdom, and a bit of luck.
Any other way to make that much money is not likely to be legal, and very likely to not work at all.
That being said, if you're content to break the law anyway, there are easier and safer ways to make that money than sending a fortune of your own money to some stranger overseas.
-Restil
Yes, but to do this properly would generally require someone to have access to the internal programming of the banking system. Making 1 cent transactions might be possible, but they will certainly show up and be more noticeable than if 1 cent just disappeared from the balance. If your account has 200 transactions a month and carries a balance over $20000, you're only going to try to balance that so many times before you give up trying to find the penny. Heck, you could lose a dollar or two at that rate and likely get away with it. But the importance of this method is that the actual transaction doesn't show up.
Then again... if you could find a way to disguise the transaction as a fee, it would likely get overlooked as well. :)
-Restil
But I don't want to be a farmer, plowing fields with rocks, hoping to save enough extra to survive the winter, and hoping I don't catch some fatal disease so I can live until I'm at least into my 40s.
Yes, I could live without it if I had to. But I don't want to, and I'm guessing that nobody else wants to either. We can't go back, and we can't stay where we are, so we only go forward.
But if it will put your mind at ease, you can be contented in the fact that 10 years from now, there will likely be some new electronic gadget that nobody can live without which will annoy us far worse than cellphones or ipods ever did.
Well, most hosting providers actually expect their customers to use a significant amount of the bandwidth they provide, and enforce quotas when reached. If a customer used 100% of their allocated bandwidth they would at most be cut off for the duration of their payment period, or given the option to purchase additional bandwidth. This isn't like a cable company offering "unlimited" bandwidth and retroactively redefining the meaning of unlimited.
Some people spend more than that a month on their car... others drive a 10 year old car and have no payments. The money isn't that hard to come by if you want to spend it badly enough. The real question, is what you're spending it on actually worth it?
-Restil
Interest only loans exist for perfectly good reasons. They just aren't good reasons when applied to something like a home mortgage, that you're SUPPOSED to pay off over time. Consider a business line of credit. Lets say I run a business which I want to expand. This will require me to carry debt for a short period of time. Commercial paper is what they call it, but an interest only loan is basically what we're talking about here. I do something, or sell something that has an expense to create. I need to spend the money now but it'll be 30, or 60, or 90 days before I get paid for it. So fine, in 90 days I'll get paid, and it will cost me say $10 to produce the product and $2 in interest, but I'll make $15 once it gets paid off. When the choices are make $3 or make $0 becuase I can't afford to produce it in the first place, it makes sense. So it's going to take 90 days to get paid, but in 30 days, I need to crank out another product. That means more loans. In fact, that means I'll virtually ALWAYS have a loan out, which I'm paying interest on all the time, but never paying off. Of course, I could use my profits to pay down the debt, and if I'm not growing, requiring further up front expenses, then I certainly will pay it down. But for a company that's growing, a long term interest only loan makes perfect sense, as it provides them with the ability to make money. The bank certainly has no problem with it.
The difference here is, a house that you're living in doesn't make any money. At least, it's not supposed to. Oh sure, if you maintain it well it shouldn't lose any value, and if you spend $40k to add on a couple rooms, it might increase in value proportionately, but you're doing good if you sell your house for 6% more than you bought it for. Just enough extra to pay off the realestate agents and not consider it a loss.
All of that changes though when you consider that a house might increase in value, not because it generates revenue, but because the housing market in your area increases and suddenly your house is worth more... just because it is. The bank now thinks that this is safe collateral on a interest free loan as they'd be able to recover their investment through a foreclosure. That's why we had a subprime mess to begin with. The banks simply didn't care if the owner could pay the loan back as the house would be worth more later anyway.
There's another way to look at it. Interest payments on home mortgages are tax deductible. If you're constantly carrying around $20k in credit card debt, it makes perfect sense to refinance your home and pay that off. First off, you'd have a lower interest rate, and secondly, interest payments on the cards were not tax deductible and now those payments are. So if you're the type that's sitting with maxed out credit cards and you keep them maxed out, it might just make sense to transfer that debt to your mortgage, cut up the cards, and make interest only payments and pay cash for everything else for now on. Of course, that represents and requires a level of responsibility that you're probably not going to be able to live up to in the long run, and ultimately that's a big part of the problem. If people were more fiscally responsible in the first place, didn't purchase beyond their means, everything would be perfectly peachy right now.
-Restil
I don't think we've lost faith in the stock markets. The public said the same thing back in 2001, and yet the market recovered to drop again another day. It happens. There are tons of people right now insisting that people have given up on the market while there's a (probably smaller group), who's patiently waiting with a pile of cash for the market to hit bottom so they can take advantage of the glorious opportunity that has been presented to them. The stock market is a long term game. Those who play it in the short term might as well stick to card counting at blackjack. The odds of coming out ahead are about the same and it takes a lot less time to get good at it.
The only way to lose in the long term would be if the economy totally crashed and never recovered. In that case, it wouldn't matter if you won or lost, so you wouldn't ever want to bet on that eventuality.
-Restil