Unfortunately it's a two-story house with no serviceable attic. Eventually we may have some renovation work done anyhow, and we would consider having the house wired at that point - as long as they're opening/repairing/moving walls anyhow.
Perhaps - do you really feel alienated because the DVD isn't already on the shelves? I don't, but that's just my opinion. I haven't bought the VHS; probably will buy the DVD when it becomes available, assuming the price is reasonable.
If it was that important to me to have the movie, I'd just buy the VHS copy. Which is exactly what George would like me to do. It's not that important to me, so I'll wait for the DVD.
I don't know that George has any obligation to provide a DVD edition of his movie on any particular timeframe. I also doubt that Star Wars fans are likely to not buy the DVD, or not go to see Episode 2 when it comes out, as a protest over its delay.
George is a producer and a businessman. I don't begrudge him the ability to make money. If he REALLY wanted to make his fans happy he'd give away free DVDs of the movie to everybody as they exit the theater. That seems like an unreasonable expectation, however.:)
I'll second the reccomendation for Fedders. At our old house we didn't have central A/C and since my wife telecommutes from home we had to make her office as livable as possible. We got one of the Fedders portable units from Home Depot (~$600?) and set it up.
It was easy to use, did an effective job of cooling the 12x12 room, and wasn't overly noisy, considering.
You will need to empty the water occasionally, but even in humid Hawaii we didn't need to do it more than once every few weeks or a month or so and there is an indicator light that tells you when to do it.
Perhaps the spammer doesn't get charged unless you leave a message, but the 800 answering service does. Maybe they'll be more discriminating about their customers if they start getting a lot of charges like that.
I suppose if you have the time you could leave a message for them asking them to call you back at a pay phone or bogus number.
Not that I'm advocating such actions, of course.:)
When I get calls from telemarketers who don't take no for the first answer I ask them to please hold on. Then I put the phone down...
A couple of minutes later I'll pick it up and ask if they're still there; often they are. "Thanks, please keep holding" I'll ask.
Five minutes later I'll pick it up and ask if they're still there. Usually they aren't. If they are, I ask them to keep holding.
Eventually they hang up.
If they don't recognize that "No, thank you" means that I'm not going to buy their product, then they deserve to waste their time listening to silence instead of bothering other people.
When I was in private practice I used to turn the tables on them and start trying to sell them my services. Eventually they'd spend the whole call trying to decline my offer, never getting a chance to sell their product, while I was being as persistent as they were.
They're mostly working off a script, so do anything to throw them off the script. Start sharing recipes with them, ask who won the Lakers game, pretend you're their long lost Uncle Charlie, or whatever.
If they're going to be pests you might as well at least have some fun with them. Just my $.02. Keep the change.
If he releases the DVD immediately how many VHS copies does he sell? The real fans will buy the VHS because they can't wait and then buy the DVD when it finally releases. More money for George.
I guess I'll take George's word for it, but I've always suspected that they waited on the DVD so that the real fans would buy the VHS first. If they released the DVD right away, folks who have DVD would just buy the DVD. If they wait a year then the fans who don't want to wait will buy the VHS immediately and then buy the DVD also (for the higher quality and extra features) when it finally releases.
We bought a new house but had the misfortune of getting it AFTER they'd finished all of the drywall and painting. Running Cat5 is going to be a tremendous expense for us because they'd have to reopen the walls (and close them again afterwards).
802.11 wireless, however, will give us 11Mbps networking without any limitation within our house and even our yard. The cost is very reasonable and the main use of the LAN is to share a printer and our cable modem -- since 11Mbps is faster than either our printer or modem it should be more than sufficient.
-Coach-
Re:Would we know it if we saw it?
on
Explaining SETI
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· Score: 1
Well, o.k., but I don't know that "teeming" is necessarily the case or even that intelligent life is particuarly common. I do think it likely exists out there, however. It just seems a little premature to dismiss the idea just because we haven't identified them yet.
Let me restate that I'm skeptical that SETI will ever locate any extraterrestrial intelligence, by the way.
-Coach-
Re:Would we know it if we saw it?
on
Explaining SETI
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· Score: 1
You're thinking on too small a time scale. Remember, the galaxy is about 12 billion years old. We are about 2-300,000 years old. We've only had technology for about 4-10,000 years, advanced technology only a few hundred, and space travel for 40 years. That's nothing! The odds of two species evolving at precisely the same time is vanishingly small, given the time scale.
True enough, however the galaxy hasn't been static for 12 billion years. It's possible that we didn't get started for the first 11 billion or so years because the conditions were not yet such to support the advancement of intelligent life up until that point.
Of course, it's also possible that the other life in our galaxy is so much MORE advanced than we are that we aren't able to perceive it -- or it deliberately avoids us.
Is it necessarily the case that other intelligent life would colonize worlds other than their own? Perhaps their size relative to their environment is such that their own world is many times larger than Earth and they are still exploring and colonizing other parts of their own world. Perhaps they don't reproduce at rates equivalent to humans or perhaps their lifespans are such that it isn't an issue.
Would we consider dogs to be intelligent life? I think if we discovered a race of wild poodles on Mars we'd consider that as intelligent life; but I don't think we could expect a race of poodles to be travelling in space. I suppose it's always possible that Earth poodles have just been so domesticated that their natural astrophysics skills have atrophied beyond discern.
Also we know nothing, obviously, of the use and availability of resources. In a world that is resource rich, or where the occupants sufficiently conserve/produce their own, there may not be as much motivation to colonize away from the home planet. There's also the possibility that an alien intelligence doesn't have the natural resources to create space travel machines.
Ultimately I think there are just so many scenarios that allow for intelligent life to exist in our galaxy without our having discovered them as of yet. We shouldn't assume that any intelligent life is going to be anything like us in biology, psychology or environment.
-Coach-
Re:Would we know it if we saw it?
on
Explaining SETI
·
· Score: 1
O.K., but my point is that even if there is life EXACTLY like us...we haven't filled the Galaxy yet and there's no reason to assume that other life forms like us would necessarily be significantly more advanced than we are.
Life forms not as advanced as we are, no matter how old, may not have the capability of controlled space travel.
Life forms more advanced than we are might already be travelling and either they avoid us or we're not sufficiently advanced to reliably perceive them.
In order for your argument to be true there would have to be sufficient numbers of aliens who were sufficiently advanced to travel to and colonize other worlds, but not so advanced that they would evade our observation. Since that seems to be a much narrower band of probability it seems unfair to base the argument that we're alone on the evidence that nothing we can perceive has already colonized the rest of the galaxy.
I realize you only specified the galaxy, but it still seems shortsighted to assume that there aren't more simple, yet still sentient, beings out there somewhere. There might also be infinitely more complex beings out there somewhere. There might also be other "humans" out there somewhere who are simply not significantly more advanced than we are. There are dozens of scenarios where there is other intelligence in the world but assuming that any other intelligence would naturally expand, would have already done so sufficiently to reach us and would be perceptible to us puny humans seems like a reach to me.
Outside the galaxy it's a very big universe (Understatement alert!) and apparently expanding. Statistically speaking it seems practically guaranteed that there is intelligent life elsewhere in the universe, even if it is relatively scarce in our galaxy.
-Coach-
Would we know it if we saw it?
on
Explaining SETI
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· Score: 1
The problem with this argument is that it makes the assumption that we could identify (or even comprehend) an extraterrestrial being if we saw one. They could exist on planes or as forms of matter that we don't even imagine.
Humans tend to assume that intelligent life is going to have spaceships and clothes. Maybe Earth is just a marble in some alien kid's collection?
If the universe truly began "all at once" and the conditions that created us are relatively new, its also possible that the same conditions created more beings of a similar type elsewhere in the universe - and at roughly the same time. Perhaps they're right now trying to find a replacement for their space shuttle and listening hard to see if anybody else is out there.
Just because only a few humans (of undetermined mental state) claim to have perceived alien life doesn't mean they aren't out there. David Spade has a succesful TV show -- that's as much evidence of alien intelligence as anything!
Chances are good that your dog is not really aware of fish...but that doesn't mean there aren't any fish. Maybe humans just aren't capable, currently, of perceiving and identifying extra-terrestrial intelligences?
-Coach-
Perhaps they just know better...
on
Explaining SETI
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· Score: 1
It's also possible that an extra terrestrial intelligence is aware of us, but not interested in meeting us. Perhaps they've seen what we've done to every other species we've encountered and would rather not get involved.
Also possible that, as others have suggested, the alien intelligence finds us too primitive and not worth bothering with. Perhaps they've seen Pauly Shore and David Hasselhoff and decided that they'd go see what was happening on Mars instead.
Or, we could be as mysterious to them as they are to us. Perhaps we pass through the same space on a regular basis but neither party is capable of reliably detecting and identifying the other.
I suspect that the alien intelligence being bipedal and oxygen breathing is more a matter of Hollywood than reality.
-Coach-
The real impact of finding proof of ET...
on
Explaining SETI
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· Score: 1
The more important result of actually finding an extra-terrestrial intelligence is probably the effect it would have on humans. 5,000 years of religious dogma would be thrown on its ear. Think of what happens to Christianity if its discovered that we are NOT alone in the universe?
The social ramifications of such a discovery would change the world; even if no actual contact was made for generations.
That said, I think the SETI project has very little hope of actually identifying an alien intelligence. It is either arrogant or optimistic to think that an alien intelligence would be broadcasting on a wavelength we can detect with a signal we could comprehend.
To paraphrase Billy Bob Thornton from Armageddon "We can only watch about 1% of the sky and, begging your pardon sir, but it's a big-ass sky."
I should add that I *do* participate in the SETI@Home project, but that's mostly because I find their peer to peer computing model interesting and a group of my friends participate so the comarderie and "racing" aspect of it is entertaining. Maybe we'll identify an extraterrestrial intelligence with it, but I doubt it.
Because they're the ones receiving most of the mail from the clients in the asian countries. (and they aren't techs, [/minor point])
Aside from that, I shouldn't have to hassle with maintaining separate filters for various groups of users just because some spammers can't understand that we don't want to participate in their "Get Rich Quick" scams or have various personal body parts enlarged.
Ultimately the issue is with how many of our resources are consumed by dealing with spam. In our case there is a minor amount of technical resources (bandwidth, disk space, etc.) and a significant amount of human resources (maintaining filters, reviewing and deleting spam, etc.) consumed. While we don't quantify exactly what the costs are, it's reasonable to think that a value exceeding several hundred (or even a couple of thousand) dollars a month is not unreasonable.
In my opinion spammers have no right to assume they should be allowed to impose upon us like that. I don't mind opt-in lists or (to a lesser degree) vendors we have a relationship with. I mind very much the deluge of "Mortgage Rates have dropped!" and asian porn spam that floods into our servers on an hourly basis.
We do some filtering here (MAILSweeper for SMTP), but we really can't afford to filter out entire domains very often. The reason, as you aptly cited, we do have some clients and customers in those areas and we'd run the very real risk of blocking legitimate mail.
As it is our filter really just quarantines most of the mail and our admins have to take a few minutes, twice a day, and sift through all of it to make sure no legitimate messages were inadvertently snared. 95%+ of what gets caught is junk, but there are always one or two messages in the quarantine that were legit (though rarely important).
It sorta defeats the purpose of having an emergency pager if you turn it off in the middle of the night. In many organizations IS Support is a 24/7/365.25 job -- somebody is always on call and unless they're going to sit in the computer center playing Quake all night they're going to have to carry some kind of remote communication device when they go home.
I usually don't bother pursuing spammers or trying to get them cancelled. The lone exception is spammers who insist upon setting the priority of their message to "High" -- which does alert our support guys. When that happens we do complain to their ISP and take other measures to express our displeasure with the spammer's tactic.
As for the ISPs, the provider who supplies our corporate pipe to the Internet charges us if our monthly bandwidth limit exceeds a preset point. So far we've managed to stay beneath that point - but we'd be pretty irritated to incur that extra charge because some spammer decided it was imperative to send a 100K HTML spam to every address in our organization -- every day, muliple times.
Where I work the "professionals" bill by the hour. How much time do they have to spend reviewing and deleting spam?
[Hypothetical]Let's say they get 20 spams a day and it takes them 3 seconds to deal with each one of them. That's a minute per day or an hour every 2 months. At $200 per hour (their billing rate) it's costing them $100 a month to deal with spam. Each. Since there are about 30 of them in the company at any given time that means it costs my company about $3,000 a month.
That's just the folks who bill by the hour. What about productivity losses for those staff members who don't bill by the hour, but still lose the same productivity? What happens if somebody goes on vacation, their mailbox fills with spam, reaches its storage limits and legitimate mail from clients gets bounced?
How about the bandwidth wasted transferring hundreds of e-mail messages (increasingly in HTML)? That bandwidth isn't free.
How about the CPU cycles and storage space wasted processing junk e-mail?
Maybe home users putzing around with their little AOL accounts don't have much in the way of tangible costs, but I can assure you that those of us who actually have to run and support e-mail systems can show you costs associated with high volumes of junk e-mail.
I think the idea was that if you put the website as the e-mail user, when the spam arrives at your domain it's going to get bounced for an invalid address...but as the admin you'll get an NDR report that shows that an inbound message for that address was bounced. Hence you don't need to actually create the alias because you don't actually intend to accept the spam.
If I'm understanding his excellent suggestion correctly, of course.
My primary business e-mail account has to be out there in order for customers and such to reach me. I can keep a private account for friends and family, but my work account is still going to be filled with Spam.
We find that MAILSweeper for SMTP is an effective filtering tool that lets us filter on custom phrases "Get Rich Quick!!!" and other such so that most spam gets dumped into the turf directory rather than filling up our mailboxes.
Intellectual property law, controversial though it may be, is designed to promote innovation and reasonable pricing. Would anybody spend years and millions of dollars to develop something if they knew that they'd only sell one of them (because the next 400,000 sold would just be copies made by that first customer)?
Answer: Yes, they would...and they would factor that expectation of copying into their price such that buying the product from the producer would cost an exhorbitant amount of money because you'd also be paying for all of the under-the-table copies the producer expects you to distribute.
A representative from a major software company not based in Redmond, WA, once said that the reason his company never produced a chinese-language version (and they did have French, Spanish, etc.) was because piracy is so rampant in Asia that they knew they'd only ever sell a couple of copies of it.
Even with all of the philosophical concerns I may have with Intellectual Property Law, I have to agree that at some levels it's necessary.
I think Papskier has it right -- the company that buys the rights to issue the rental keys may be able to make a profit by not having to invest any money in product development, advertising, etc.
Also because they're just a clearinghouse they'd be able to buy up the keys from any/all failed companies they want -- including the possibility that they could be renting out keys for competing products. No skin off them which product you use - they collect the revenue either way - all they have to do is keep providing keys until you're ready to move on to somebody else's product.
Slashdot Mirror
-Coach-
If it was that important to me to have the movie, I'd just buy the VHS copy. Which is exactly what George would like me to do. It's not that important to me, so I'll wait for the DVD.
I don't know that George has any obligation to provide a DVD edition of his movie on any particular timeframe. I also doubt that Star Wars fans are likely to not buy the DVD, or not go to see Episode 2 when it comes out, as a protest over its delay.
George is a producer and a businessman. I don't begrudge him the ability to make money. If he REALLY wanted to make his fans happy he'd give away free DVDs of the movie to everybody as they exit the theater. That seems like an unreasonable expectation, however. :)
-Coach-
It was easy to use, did an effective job of cooling the 12x12 room, and wasn't overly noisy, considering.
You will need to empty the water occasionally, but even in humid Hawaii we didn't need to do it more than once every few weeks or a month or so and there is an indicator light that tells you when to do it.
-Coach-
I suppose if you have the time you could leave a message for them asking them to call you back at a pay phone or bogus number.
Not that I'm advocating such actions, of course. :)
-Coach-
A couple of minutes later I'll pick it up and ask if they're still there; often they are. "Thanks, please keep holding" I'll ask.
Five minutes later I'll pick it up and ask if they're still there. Usually they aren't. If they are, I ask them to keep holding.
Eventually they hang up.
If they don't recognize that "No, thank you" means that I'm not going to buy their product, then they deserve to waste their time listening to silence instead of bothering other people.
When I was in private practice I used to turn the tables on them and start trying to sell them my services. Eventually they'd spend the whole call trying to decline my offer, never getting a chance to sell their product, while I was being as persistent as they were.
They're mostly working off a script, so do anything to throw them off the script. Start sharing recipes with them, ask who won the Lakers game, pretend you're their long lost Uncle Charlie, or whatever.
If they're going to be pests you might as well at least have some fun with them. Just my $.02. Keep the change.
-Coach-
-Coach-
-Coach-
Maybe I'm a cynic. :)
-Coach-
802.11 wireless, however, will give us 11Mbps networking without any limitation within our house and even our yard. The cost is very reasonable and the main use of the LAN is to share a printer and our cable modem -- since 11Mbps is faster than either our printer or modem it should be more than sufficient.
-Coach-
Let me restate that I'm skeptical that SETI will ever locate any extraterrestrial intelligence, by the way.
-Coach-
True enough, however the galaxy hasn't been static for 12 billion years. It's possible that we didn't get started for the first 11 billion or so years because the conditions were not yet such to support the advancement of intelligent life up until that point.
Of course, it's also possible that the other life in our galaxy is so much MORE advanced than we are that we aren't able to perceive it -- or it deliberately avoids us.
Is it necessarily the case that other intelligent life would colonize worlds other than their own? Perhaps their size relative to their environment is such that their own world is many times larger than Earth and they are still exploring and colonizing other parts of their own world. Perhaps they don't reproduce at rates equivalent to humans or perhaps their lifespans are such that it isn't an issue.
Would we consider dogs to be intelligent life? I think if we discovered a race of wild poodles on Mars we'd consider that as intelligent life; but I don't think we could expect a race of poodles to be travelling in space. I suppose it's always possible that Earth poodles have just been so domesticated that their natural astrophysics skills have atrophied beyond discern.
Also we know nothing, obviously, of the use and availability of resources. In a world that is resource rich, or where the occupants sufficiently conserve/produce their own, there may not be as much motivation to colonize away from the home planet. There's also the possibility that an alien intelligence doesn't have the natural resources to create space travel machines.
Ultimately I think there are just so many scenarios that allow for intelligent life to exist in our galaxy without our having discovered them as of yet. We shouldn't assume that any intelligent life is going to be anything like us in biology, psychology or environment.
-Coach-
Life forms not as advanced as we are, no matter how old, may not have the capability of controlled space travel.
Life forms more advanced than we are might already be travelling and either they avoid us or we're not sufficiently advanced to reliably perceive them.
In order for your argument to be true there would have to be sufficient numbers of aliens who were sufficiently advanced to travel to and colonize other worlds, but not so advanced that they would evade our observation. Since that seems to be a much narrower band of probability it seems unfair to base the argument that we're alone on the evidence that nothing we can perceive has already colonized the rest of the galaxy.
I realize you only specified the galaxy, but it still seems shortsighted to assume that there aren't more simple, yet still sentient, beings out there somewhere. There might also be infinitely more complex beings out there somewhere. There might also be other "humans" out there somewhere who are simply not significantly more advanced than we are. There are dozens of scenarios where there is other intelligence in the world but assuming that any other intelligence would naturally expand, would have already done so sufficiently to reach us and would be perceptible to us puny humans seems like a reach to me.
Outside the galaxy it's a very big universe (Understatement alert!) and apparently expanding. Statistically speaking it seems practically guaranteed that there is intelligent life elsewhere in the universe, even if it is relatively scarce in our galaxy.
-Coach-
Humans tend to assume that intelligent life is going to have spaceships and clothes. Maybe Earth is just a marble in some alien kid's collection?
If the universe truly began "all at once" and the conditions that created us are relatively new, its also possible that the same conditions created more beings of a similar type elsewhere in the universe - and at roughly the same time. Perhaps they're right now trying to find a replacement for their space shuttle and listening hard to see if anybody else is out there.
Just because only a few humans (of undetermined mental state) claim to have perceived alien life doesn't mean they aren't out there. David Spade has a succesful TV show -- that's as much evidence of alien intelligence as anything!
Chances are good that your dog is not really aware of fish...but that doesn't mean there aren't any fish. Maybe humans just aren't capable, currently, of perceiving and identifying extra-terrestrial intelligences?
-Coach-
Also possible that, as others have suggested, the alien intelligence finds us too primitive and not worth bothering with. Perhaps they've seen Pauly Shore and David Hasselhoff and decided that they'd go see what was happening on Mars instead.
Or, we could be as mysterious to them as they are to us. Perhaps we pass through the same space on a regular basis but neither party is capable of reliably detecting and identifying the other.
I suspect that the alien intelligence being bipedal and oxygen breathing is more a matter of Hollywood than reality.
-Coach-
The social ramifications of such a discovery would change the world; even if no actual contact was made for generations.
That said, I think the SETI project has very little hope of actually identifying an alien intelligence. It is either arrogant or optimistic to think that an alien intelligence would be broadcasting on a wavelength we can detect with a signal we could comprehend.
To paraphrase Billy Bob Thornton from Armageddon "We can only watch about 1% of the sky and, begging your pardon sir, but it's a big-ass sky."
I should add that I *do* participate in the SETI@Home project, but that's mostly because I find their peer to peer computing model interesting and a group of my friends participate so the comarderie and "racing" aspect of it is entertaining. Maybe we'll identify an extraterrestrial intelligence with it, but I doubt it.
-Coach-
-Coach-
Aside from that, I shouldn't have to hassle with maintaining separate filters for various groups of users just because some spammers can't understand that we don't want to participate in their "Get Rich Quick" scams or have various personal body parts enlarged.
Ultimately the issue is with how many of our resources are consumed by dealing with spam. In our case there is a minor amount of technical resources (bandwidth, disk space, etc.) and a significant amount of human resources (maintaining filters, reviewing and deleting spam, etc.) consumed. While we don't quantify exactly what the costs are, it's reasonable to think that a value exceeding several hundred (or even a couple of thousand) dollars a month is not unreasonable.
In my opinion spammers have no right to assume they should be allowed to impose upon us like that. I don't mind opt-in lists or (to a lesser degree) vendors we have a relationship with. I mind very much the deluge of "Mortgage Rates have dropped!" and asian porn spam that floods into our servers on an hourly basis.
-Coach-
http://belps.freewebsites.com/index.htm
Disclaimer:I have no idea if any of this is true or not. Just an interesting read for those interested in spam and anti-spam.
-Coach-
As it is our filter really just quarantines most of the mail and our admins have to take a few minutes, twice a day, and sift through all of it to make sure no legitimate messages were inadvertently snared. 95%+ of what gets caught is junk, but there are always one or two messages in the quarantine that were legit (though rarely important).
-Coach-
I usually don't bother pursuing spammers or trying to get them cancelled. The lone exception is spammers who insist upon setting the priority of their message to "High" -- which does alert our support guys. When that happens we do complain to their ISP and take other measures to express our displeasure with the spammer's tactic.
As for the ISPs, the provider who supplies our corporate pipe to the Internet charges us if our monthly bandwidth limit exceeds a preset point. So far we've managed to stay beneath that point - but we'd be pretty irritated to incur that extra charge because some spammer decided it was imperative to send a 100K HTML spam to every address in our organization -- every day, muliple times.
-Coach-
[Hypothetical]Let's say they get 20 spams a day and it takes them 3 seconds to deal with each one of them. That's a minute per day or an hour every 2 months. At $200 per hour (their billing rate) it's costing them $100 a month to deal with spam. Each. Since there are about 30 of them in the company at any given time that means it costs my company about $3,000 a month.
That's just the folks who bill by the hour. What about productivity losses for those staff members who don't bill by the hour, but still lose the same productivity? What happens if somebody goes on vacation, their mailbox fills with spam, reaches its storage limits and legitimate mail from clients gets bounced?
How about the bandwidth wasted transferring hundreds of e-mail messages (increasingly in HTML)? That bandwidth isn't free.
How about the CPU cycles and storage space wasted processing junk e-mail?
Maybe home users putzing around with their little AOL accounts don't have much in the way of tangible costs, but I can assure you that those of us who actually have to run and support e-mail systems can show you costs associated with high volumes of junk e-mail.
-Coach-
If I'm understanding his excellent suggestion correctly, of course.
-Coach-
We find that MAILSweeper for SMTP is an effective filtering tool that lets us filter on custom phrases "Get Rich Quick!!!" and other such so that most spam gets dumped into the turf directory rather than filling up our mailboxes.
-Coach-
Answer: Yes, they would...and they would factor that expectation of copying into their price such that buying the product from the producer would cost an exhorbitant amount of money because you'd also be paying for all of the under-the-table copies the producer expects you to distribute.
A representative from a major software company not based in Redmond, WA, once said that the reason his company never produced a chinese-language version (and they did have French, Spanish, etc.) was because piracy is so rampant in Asia that they knew they'd only ever sell a couple of copies of it.
Even with all of the philosophical concerns I may have with Intellectual Property Law, I have to agree that at some levels it's necessary.
-Coach-
Also because they're just a clearinghouse they'd be able to buy up the keys from any/all failed companies they want -- including the possibility that they could be renting out keys for competing products. No skin off them which product you use - they collect the revenue either way - all they have to do is keep providing keys until you're ready to move on to somebody else's product.
-Coach-