That *might* be possible, when something like Robert Hettinga's IBUC is out (supposed to be 01/01/01, but I know how these things usually go, so I'd add "at the earliest" to that date). I don't think the PayPal interface (which is pretty good, don't get me wrong) or even my favorite, e-gold, can do that kind of thing at present without driving readers insane with constant passphrase/account# requests. (I could be wrong, as I have yet to see the latest PayPal shopping cart, and they're smart guys.) I look forward to IBUC and possibly others making this kind of thing possible soon, though.
e-metal is cheaper to use than plastic, even if you don't make a market in it, and I wonder what kind of fee he's paying, or if he's getting many "charge backs." As always,/. readers can create a free e-gold account and nick me for a bit of gold, if you like. Thanks. JMR
I will be at IA2000 again this in September, in New Orleans, once-again telling Adult providers about a payment system that will allow them to get paid and STAY paid, with NO CHARGEBACKS (my mantra for Miami's IA2000 last year).
Still, this article brings up an important reason why I haven't been too successful with the adult industry so far, IMO (it's certainly not for lack of trying!!!). They want to automagically charge people who didn't even visit their (stale, in many cases) sites this month, and with e-gold they'd have to work harder, and not all of them want to work very hard, since they've been used to this mint (er...goldmine?) of automatic-charging. Using a medium where their customers see what they'll pay every month might cause those customers to want them to do something every month. IMO, this rant probably doesn't apply to all pron-sites, YMMV, etc.
As usual, any/. reader who sends me an account number will get a spot of e-gold to try, it's useful for more than just adult stuff or really-cool gambling sites, especially if you folks'd take advantage of it. JMR
If a corporation has your Visa number, than several persons do as well. ...
Ain't it the truth. Of course, anyone on the planet can know that my e-gold account number is 101574 (well, among others, but that's the main one) and all they can do is spend to it without my passphrase. I guess what I'm saying (ok, while plugging my company's currency) is that 1950s technology stapled onto the world wide web does not make "ecommerce" once you've tried a better system. JMR (And, once again,/. readers are encouraged to try e-gold, tell me an account number and I'll click you half a gram or so.)
I think anonymous is saying that you may have seriously underestimated the junket-potential of ICANN, Jim.
Does anyone know if ICANN is still wallowing in debt (or which interested party bailed them out and in exchange for what). And who gets all those frequent-flyer miles anyway?
Suddenly, I'd like to be an ICANN bureaucrat, since it'll vastly reduce my costs of travelling the world without inducing any excessive brainload.:^) JMR
It might be less a result of them being bookstores & libraries, and more of a result of the transaction system used (he says, in another completely self-interested comment).
Visa, MasterCard, etc. may not be able to tell Kenneth's investigators just which book(s) Monica bought for Slick, but they'll tell (or sell, or both) that she shopped at www.bn.com and when without batting an eye. From there, asking B&N which book(s) was probably pretty easy.
I wonder if B&N even asked for one of those pesky warrant-things before giving the info up to him? JMR
Wow, thanks, I didn't think it was that bad (and, working with grams of metal as a currency every day, I should know). I guess I recall hearing that the price would go down to single-digit-land, and at the time (and yesterday evening) I wasn't even thinking of inflation. I sincerely appreciate the correction, though.
I still think Courtney Love was talking about e-gold without knowing it, and I wish I could get her (and others) to notice what it can do to reduce the artificial economic friction between artists & fans. JMR
Buying a CD (hey, weren't they supposed to finally go down in price when we all switched from vinyl??) at $15 is not my idea of a fair tip for the typical song. Paying for every song on a CD also doesn't solve the problem of artists bundling crap with good stuff. That won't work anymore, artists, and you're going to have to deal with it just as Courtney said. JMR
Of course, there are few ways (only one, that I know of, but I'm biased as hell) to efficiently pay anyone, anywhere, a dollar's worth of anything (much less ten cents worth) on the internet. The problem, as I've said before, is that in this debate it's a lot more fun to scream "LIAR" and "THIEF" back and forth than to actually do something in the real world of economics about what Courtney Love said, and make yourself ABLE to give her the tip she deserves for her music if she'd just ask me for it. *sigh* JMR
(Ready to click a million geeks a spot of e-gold, as usual, just send me your account number.)
Now THAT was a real classic game, two player Asteroids-on-acid, and if you played cooperatively (hooked together by essentially a fuse) and marched left to right, you could kill everything and get about an hour of play out of 2 quarters (which is why arcade owners hated it, I guess). *sigh* It was one of the few games where you could cooperate, violently, against a computer with friends, instead of just killing your buddies all the time (though that mode was available, too). I miss it. JMR
Is certainly behind productivity. And an e-gold account is free to set up. (I know, I know. Coming soon: pages in espanol).
Gold has had a long and sordid history in man's exploitation of man (see slavery) so the irony of this is especially fun for folks who know a bit of history. Again my offer to click a bit of e-gold to anyone who wants to try it still stands (and again, probably very few of you will take me up on it. Oh well).
From my experience (and especially if they try to go worldwide) they're likely to not-choose and then exclude efficient payment systems, instead relying on a single system plagued with fraud, because only a 1950s system (inartfully stapled to the internet) could ever be the vaunted "ecommerce" to the pointy-haired set.
I'd love to be proven wrong, though, and maybe a few of them will care about STAYING paid...If so, contact me.:^) JMR
But does your grandmother want to have a computer?
Yes, if using it feels just like using a telephone or a television set (no, I don't want her using WebTV, though).
She is from a time before keyboards were common, and she has neither the time nor the physical dexterity to learn how to type. OTOH, she can still talk. There are probably many people in her generation in a similar situation, and voice (possibly, IBM's ViaVoice for Linux, or possibly something else) would be the obvious input device. IMO. JMR
I agree, and the ultimate (albeit non-graphical) user interface would be your PDA capturing VOICE as an input, imo. Given Moore's law and other effects, this probably isn't as far-off as it seems. Ultimately, we might be used to a device taking down everything a professor says, and cooperating with the device to filter and distill THAT into something useful, something akin to the opposite of taking notes traditionally, with the possibly the same or similar result. Maybe.
On another topic, I am especially interested in anyone's experiences with IBM's ViaVoice for Linux. My grandmother is old, she will never use a keyboard and only maybe a mouse, so if I want her to have a computer (and I do) before she dies, this is my only choice. Thanks. JMR
Western Union does take a bite, speed and risk cost more, but you can always lock in a rate and snail a check. The problem with templates of common information is that we don't trust other financial institutions (even Western Union) with customer info. There are a number of marketing friendly things that our policies keep us from doing, and I'm constantly trying to think of ways to comply and still do what I want. JMR
Because e-gold is a different currency (actually, four currencies) denominated in grams, the expensive part of the whole process (and the part that feeds me!) is the exchange transaction from other currencies (here's a calculator). e-gold is still cheaper than credit cards, especially for large companies with clue-resistant management.
e-gold Ltd. is a bailee, and not a bank (in fact, e-gold Ltd. has never even had a bank account). A bailee merely stores things on behalf of customers (imagine those mini-storage warehouses springing up all over in the USA for a similar legal relationship example) and cannot make loans, etc. e-gold Ltd. concentrates on storing allocated, good-delivery bars of bullion metal.
OmniPay, which currently shares the e-gold.com site with e-gold Ltd., has plenty of bank accounts all over the planet in a variety of currencies, and is the principal market maker in the e-metal family of currencies. It's important to keep in mind that e-gold & OmniPay are 2 separate companies (soon to have two separate websites). OmniPay can send wires on your behalf, or send checks to any snailmail address, in exchange for your e-metal grams.
I predict with the new system(s)* both you and I will be very happy, e-gold stats on the present system have been great ever since The Gold Casino arrived on the scene, and now the casino just put up a "bet on the closing price of gold today" pool with no house take. JMR
* "Real soon now." -- and it will definitely be more Tom, Dick, & Harry friendly.
Re:Never use credit cards online.. from experience
on
A Matter Of Trust?
·
· Score: 1
Thanks for the kind words (again, my obligatory offer to click a bit of e-gold to/. readers applies here). I would not want you to get the wrong impression, while e-gold Ltd and OmniPay will NOT share, sell, give, trade, etc. customer data like the good contact information we need, e-gold can't sell privacy like Zer0Knowledge or actual digital cash forms, of which very few exist.
So, we can protect consumer privacy and provide merchants certainty of payment at low costs, but for maximum consumer protection use a credit card which extends warranties and provides product guarantees (which e-gold Ltd. & OmniPay cannot, at present). It's good to have a wide variety of payment methods, for example, I confess to being a big fan of PayPal (though I would not store very much value in their system).
I hope that folks also get interested in our phone spends of e-metal -- if it involved anything else but the filthy yellow metal, it would probably be a news story.:^/ Oh well... JMR
Re:Credit cards are not appropriate for e-commerce
on
A Matter Of Trust?
·
· Score: 1
[...]
Thanks for the kind words. As always, I'll click a bit of e-gold to ANYONE on ./ who creates an account and sends me the number. e-gold can be fun, and the FlyingRat project (Motto: "Slowly morphing to for-profit status!") might solve some problems (think "for-pay customer-support" here). Try it, you'll like it! JMR
Would increase with the expected value of the transaction(s).
I suspect credit card companies will always share as much information as the credit card companies can get away with, but I'm biased as hell.;^) I've noticed _NO_ credit card brand that competes with the other brands WRT privacy policy (I might be wrong, but I think I'd have seen one). JMR
...What about spammers outside US jurisdiction?...
Oh, you mean reality? Well, a REALLY KLUDGY but working solution is proposed at the Flying Rat Project. As usual, free e-gold for the asking to Slashdotters who want to try it. Just send me an account number. http://www.FlyingRat.org Thanks. JMR
(I may bite my tongue a lot, but I can never resist subject-lines like "How else will artists get paid?"!)
Until there's a way that artists can be paid for their work without having to charge a lot of money for their works because they have to pay for all the music/recording label's work, artists will worry about piracy. After all, this is their livelihood too.
I was at CFP99, where there was a shouting match onstage regarding the MP3 issue. Afterward, I walked up to folks involved on all sides, handed them my card, and tried to make the point that a successful music distribution system -- especially one that cut out the corporate monopolist types everyone seems to hate -- would require the ability for potential customers to successfully send micropayments, either as actual payments or as donations.
Let's face it, music is great stuff and can make lots of money for artists who deserve it, but a the best song in the world isn't worth more to me individually than today's lunch at lunchtime. Anyway, I'd hand them my card, tell them "hey, try our system out, it's free to create an account and I'm a sucker for clicking ANYBODY a little bit to see how it works, so there's no risk to you at all" and I'd get this blank "but why aren't you shouting like everybody else?" look from these people. Nobody seemed interested in the issue of how to get paid reliably and irrevocably because it was a lot more fun to scream "you THIEF!!!" at other people. Sheesh.
IF there were a way to pay a reasonable price to download a song on Napster, and know that the payment went mostly to an artist instead of a corporation (especially an offensive one, like Time-Warner) I think that most users -- even the poor college student variety -- would pay. There's no way to be SURE this is true, and survey responses don't always track behavior, and there will always be warez-kiddies who refuse to pay for anything, but I think most folks (even poor students) are honest and would want to pay.
The issue is how to implement it, and how to get folks to understand that payments don't have to be dollars, they just have to be good! Grams have been working better & better for over four years despite minimal media notice or advertising. As usual, any Slashdot reader who asks me in e-mail can have enough e-gold to personally see the difference between our cheap, "push" payment system and credit cards' sometimes costly, "pull" systems, today -- right now. I may be greedy & self-interested in making this offer to give away gold, but at least I admit it -- I'm here to help, whether or not anybody's actually listening this time... JMR
Amen! Ideally, they'd schedule it right. I'm glad to see that B5 will have an easier to view time (OTOH, I'm starting to eye Replay & TiVo anyway). JMR
I'll volunteer to supply a non-theoretical payment system option (no, not imagining ours would be the only one out there, but it works!). It's already possible to make sending e-mail cost something (only a proof of concept there, but it works!) and -- once again -- I'll click any Slashdot reader who asks me a small spot of e-gold to play with, so it's free (at first) and if you don't like it, you can ignore it. Last time nobody asked, but the offer is real. JMR
Try a FREE account (no obligation, and we don't sell, trade, or give away information.)
... OTOH, ebay-like auctions will survive -- search engines can't be fast enough and their users aren't easy to find, so auction sites will remain attractive, however even in that area single leader won't be able to survive.
Amazon also does auctions (though their auction site is obviously struggling compared to ebay). I think your main point is correct, though, more and more users will bypass Amazon's high prices and go with cheaper competition once they learn that they can find it easily. JMR
(This is going to be unpopular, but) I agree. The judge (from the looks of things, I couldn't hit the ruling) is probably right for the wrong reason(s). Spam is an insoluble jurisdictional issue because Spam is an ECONOMIC issue. Many (not all!) in the anti-spam community might be described as a bit economics-challenged. This is not to poke fun at them, but just to say that follow-the-money applies when it comes to a group of lawyer-politicians proposing a nice-sounding anti-spam law (effectiveness be damned! It employs more lawyers!!!) just as when it comes to a spammer sending nasty ol' spam (and I agree, just about all people dislike UCE, including me).
The question becomes, what can be done that's actually effective? Plenty of laws can be written to sound good and they obviously don't work! (Disclaimer: Warning, the following is going to sound crass and commercial -- spam, if you will -- even though I'm about to offer to GIVE AWAY MONEY!! and I'm not imposing on anyone's e-mail bandwidth, so moderate me down and see if I care.)
Well, after last year's FC99 in Anguilla, and a number of conversations, we came up with The Flying Rat Project (the name comes from an old joke about never seeing baby pigeons, combined with the idea of pigeons carrying messages in ancient times). Yes, right now it only uses e-gold (that will change, this is a kludgy proof-of-concept, not what we have eventually planned) and yes, I dream about eventually making some money on the damthing (horrors! I'm not a lawyer who wants more laws just to make money for the chattering-class, I'm an evil-greedy-capitalist-Firengi-pig who wants there to be a market in e-mail and thinks that economics might -- just might -- work better than yet-another law!). Anyway, it works, and has for a while without much notice.
For now, I'll give anyone in the/. community who asks for it a bit of gold to try the concept out. (I've made this offer on Slashdot in the past, with surprisingly few takers, but now there's a casino and a lottery) so I expect better results. Think about it, with a "stamp" that pays you, you might not mind spam so much. If you keep a Flying Rat e-mail address secret and "blocked" it will never get unpaid spam. The Flying Rat software will be open source, AFAIK.
Thanks for listening, you can create an account Here (please choose a good passphrase and remember it!) and then just e-mail me the account number and I'll click you a bit. For free (but try to play around with Flying Rat some, before you gamble it away). Thanks. JMR
The decline of English teaching has coincided with the rise of the internet, and it's probably possible to get through "journalism school" and get hired without even being as good at writing as I am (and I'm not great, believe me). It's sad. JMR
Slashdot Mirror
That *might* be possible, when something like Robert Hettinga's IBUC is out (supposed to be 01/01/01, but I know how these things usually go, so I'd add "at the earliest" to that date). I don't think the PayPal interface (which is pretty good, don't get me wrong) or even my favorite, e-gold, can do that kind of thing at present without driving readers insane with constant passphrase/account# requests. (I could be wrong, as I have yet to see the latest PayPal shopping cart, and they're smart guys.) I look forward to IBUC and possibly others making this kind of thing possible soon, though.
/. readers can create a free e-gold account and nick me for a bit of gold, if you like. Thanks.
e-metal is cheaper to use than plastic, even if you don't make a market in it, and I wonder what kind of fee he's paying, or if he's getting many "charge backs." As always,
JMR
I will be at IA2000 again this in September, in New Orleans, once-again telling Adult providers about a payment system that will allow them to get paid and STAY paid, with NO CHARGEBACKS (my mantra for Miami's IA2000 last year).
/. reader who sends me an account number will get a spot of e-gold to try, it's useful for more than just adult stuff or really-cool gambling sites, especially if you folks'd take advantage of it.
Still, this article brings up an important reason why I haven't been too successful with the adult industry so far, IMO (it's certainly not for lack of trying!!!). They want to automagically charge people who didn't even visit their (stale, in many cases) sites this month, and with e-gold they'd have to work harder, and not all of them want to work very hard, since they've been used to this mint (er...goldmine?) of automatic-charging. Using a medium where their customers see what they'll pay every month might cause those customers to want them to do something every month. IMO, this rant probably doesn't apply to all pron-sites, YMMV, etc.
As usual, any
JMR
If a corporation has your Visa number, than several persons do as well.
/. readers are encouraged to try e-gold, tell me an account number and I'll click you half a gram or so.)
...
Ain't it the truth. Of course, anyone on the planet can know that my e-gold account number is 101574 (well, among others, but that's the main one) and all they can do is spend to it without my passphrase. I guess what I'm saying (ok, while plugging my company's currency) is that 1950s technology stapled onto the world wide web does not make "ecommerce" once you've tried a better system.
JMR
(And, once again,
I think anonymous is saying that you may have seriously underestimated the junket-potential of ICANN, Jim.
:^)
Does anyone know if ICANN is still wallowing in debt (or which interested party bailed them out and in exchange for what). And who gets all those frequent-flyer miles anyway?
Suddenly, I'd like to be an ICANN bureaucrat, since it'll vastly reduce my costs of travelling the world without inducing any excessive brainload.
JMR
It might be less a result of them being bookstores & libraries, and more of a result of the transaction system used (he says, in another completely self-interested comment).
Visa, MasterCard, etc. may not be able to tell Kenneth's investigators just which book(s) Monica bought for Slick, but they'll tell (or sell, or both) that she shopped at www.bn.com and when without batting an eye. From there, asking B&N which book(s) was probably pretty easy.
I wonder if B&N even asked for one of those pesky warrant-things before giving the info up to him?
JMR
Wow, thanks, I didn't think it was that bad (and, working with grams of metal as a currency every day, I should know). I guess I recall hearing that the price would go down to single-digit-land, and at the time (and yesterday evening) I wasn't even thinking of inflation. I sincerely appreciate the correction, though.
I still think Courtney Love was talking about e-gold without knowing it, and I wish I could get her (and others) to notice what it can do to reduce the artificial economic friction between artists & fans.
JMR
Buying a CD (hey, weren't they supposed to finally go down in price when we all switched from vinyl??) at $15 is not my idea of a fair tip for the typical song. Paying for every song on a CD also doesn't solve the problem of artists bundling crap with good stuff. That won't work anymore, artists, and you're going to have to deal with it just as Courtney said.
JMR
Of course, there are few ways (only one, that I know of, but I'm biased as hell) to efficiently pay anyone, anywhere, a dollar's worth of anything (much less ten cents worth) on the internet. The problem, as I've said before, is that in this debate it's a lot more fun to scream "LIAR" and "THIEF" back and forth than to actually do something in the real world of economics about what Courtney Love said, and make yourself ABLE to give her the tip she deserves for her music if she'd just ask me for it. *sigh*
JMR
(Ready to click a million geeks a spot of e-gold, as usual, just send me your account number.)
Now THAT was a real classic game, two player Asteroids-on-acid, and if you played cooperatively (hooked together by essentially a fuse) and marched left to right, you could kill everything and get about an hour of play out of 2 quarters (which is why arcade owners hated it, I guess). *sigh* It was one of the few games where you could cooperate, violently, against a computer with friends, instead of just killing your buddies all the time (though that mode was available, too). I miss it.
JMR
Is certainly behind productivity. And an e-gold account is free to set up. (I know, I know. Coming soon: pages in espanol).
Gold has had a long and sordid history in man's exploitation of man (see slavery) so the irony of this is especially fun for folks who know a bit of history. Again my offer to click a bit of e-gold to anyone who wants to try it still stands (and again, probably very few of you will take me up on it. Oh well).
Moderate this down, see if I care.
JMR
From my experience (and especially if they try to go worldwide) they're likely to not-choose and then exclude efficient payment systems, instead relying on a single system plagued with fraud, because only a 1950s system (inartfully stapled to the internet) could ever be the vaunted "ecommerce" to the pointy-haired set.
:^)
I'd love to be proven wrong, though, and maybe a few of them will care about STAYING paid...If so, contact me.
JMR
But does your grandmother want to have a computer?
Yes, if using it feels just like using a telephone or a television set (no, I don't want her using WebTV, though).
She is from a time before keyboards were common, and she has neither the time nor the physical dexterity to learn how to type. OTOH, she can still talk. There are probably many people in her generation in a similar situation, and voice (possibly, IBM's ViaVoice for Linux, or possibly something else) would be the obvious input device. IMO.
JMR
I agree, and the ultimate (albeit non-graphical) user interface would be your PDA capturing VOICE as an input, imo. Given Moore's law and other effects, this probably isn't as far-off as it seems. Ultimately, we might be used to a device taking down everything a professor says, and cooperating with the device to filter and distill THAT into something useful, something akin to the opposite of taking notes traditionally, with the possibly the same or similar result. Maybe.
On another topic, I am especially interested in anyone's experiences with IBM's ViaVoice for Linux. My grandmother is old, she will never use a keyboard and only maybe a mouse, so if I want her to have a computer (and I do) before she dies, this is my only choice. Thanks.
JMR
Western Union does take a bite, speed and risk cost more, but you can always
lock in a rate and snail a check. The problem with templates of common information
is that we don't trust other financial institutions (even Western Union) with customer
info. There are a number of marketing friendly things that our policies keep us from
doing, and I'm constantly trying to think of ways to comply and still do what I want.
JMR
Because e-gold is a different currency (actually, four currencies) denominated in grams, the expensive part of the whole process (and the part that feeds me!) is the exchange transaction from other currencies (here's a calculator). e-gold is still cheaper than credit cards, especially for large companies with clue-resistant management.
e-gold Ltd. is a bailee, and not a bank (in fact, e-gold Ltd. has never even had a bank account). A bailee merely stores things on behalf of customers (imagine those mini-storage warehouses springing up all over in the USA for a similar legal relationship example) and cannot make loans, etc. e-gold Ltd. concentrates on storing allocated, good-delivery bars of bullion metal.
OmniPay, which currently shares the e-gold.com site with e-gold Ltd., has plenty of bank accounts all over the planet in a variety of currencies, and is the principal market maker in the e-metal family of currencies. It's important to keep in mind that e-gold & OmniPay are 2 separate companies (soon to have two separate websites). OmniPay can send wires on your behalf, or send checks to any snailmail address, in exchange for your e-metal grams.
Anyway, getting grams of e-gold is getting easier all the time, and you can definitely use a credit card either with Western Union or other options, so go ahead and buy some ounces from us or buy a few grams from an Australian or buy some e-gold from a US citizen and there are others springing up all the time.
I predict with the new system(s)* both you and I will be very happy, e-gold stats on the present system have been great ever since The Gold Casino arrived on the scene, and now the casino just put up a "bet on the closing price of gold today" pool with no house take.
JMR
* "Real soon now." -- and it will definitely be more Tom, Dick, & Harry friendly.
Thanks for the kind words (again, my obligatory offer to click a bit of e-gold to /. readers applies here). I would not want you to get the wrong impression, while e-gold Ltd and OmniPay will NOT share, sell, give, trade, etc. customer data like the good contact information we need, e-gold can't sell privacy like Zer0Knowledge or actual digital cash forms, of which very few exist.
:^/ Oh well...
So, we can protect consumer privacy and provide merchants certainty of payment at low costs, but for maximum consumer protection use a credit card which extends warranties and provides product guarantees (which e-gold Ltd. & OmniPay cannot, at present). It's good to have a wide variety of payment methods, for example, I confess to being a big fan of PayPal (though I would not store very much value in their system).
I hope that folks also get interested in our phone spends of e-metal -- if it involved anything else but the filthy yellow metal, it would probably be a news story.
JMR
[...]
Thanks for the kind words. As always, I'll click a bit of e-gold to ANYONE on
./ who creates an account and sends me the number. e-gold can be fun, and
the FlyingRat project (Motto: "Slowly morphing to for-profit status!") might solve some problems (think "for-pay
customer-support" here). Try it, you'll like it!
JMR
Would increase with the expected value of the transaction(s).
;^) I've
I suspect credit card companies will always share as much information as
the credit card companies can get away with, but I'm biased as hell.
noticed _NO_ credit card brand that competes with the other brands WRT
privacy policy (I might be wrong, but I think I'd have seen one).
JMR
...What about spammers outside US jurisdiction? ...
Oh, you mean reality? Well, a REALLY KLUDGY but working solution is proposed at the Flying Rat Project. As usual, free e-gold for the asking to Slashdotters who want to try it. Just send me an account number. http://www.FlyingRat.org Thanks.
JMR
(I may bite my tongue a lot, but I can never resist subject-lines like "How else will artists get paid?"!)
Until there's a way that artists can be paid for their work without having to charge a lot of money for their works because they have to pay for all the music/recording label's work, artists will worry about piracy. After all, this is their livelihood too.
I was at CFP99, where there was a shouting match onstage regarding the MP3 issue. Afterward, I walked up to folks involved on all sides, handed them my card, and tried to make the point that a successful music distribution system -- especially one that cut out the corporate monopolist types everyone seems to hate -- would require the ability for potential customers to successfully send micropayments, either as actual payments or as donations.
Let's face it, music is great stuff and can make lots of money for artists who deserve it, but a the best song in the world isn't worth more to me individually than today's lunch at lunchtime. Anyway, I'd hand them my card, tell them "hey, try our system out, it's free to create an account and I'm a sucker for clicking ANYBODY a little bit to see how it works, so there's no risk to you at all" and I'd get this blank "but why aren't you shouting like everybody else?" look from these people. Nobody seemed interested in the issue of how to get paid reliably and irrevocably because it was a lot more fun to scream "you THIEF!!!" at other people. Sheesh.
IF there were a way to pay a reasonable price to download a song on Napster, and know that the payment went mostly to an artist instead of a corporation (especially an offensive one, like Time-Warner) I think that most users -- even the poor college student variety -- would pay. There's no way to be SURE this is true, and survey responses don't always track behavior, and there will always be warez-kiddies who refuse to pay for anything, but I think most folks (even poor students) are honest and would want to pay.
The issue is how to implement it, and how to get folks to understand that payments don't have to be dollars, they just have to be good! Grams have been working better & better for over four years despite minimal media notice or advertising. As usual, any Slashdot reader who asks me in e-mail can have enough e-gold to personally see the difference between our cheap, "push" payment system and credit cards' sometimes costly, "pull" systems, today -- right now. I may be greedy & self-interested in making this offer to give away gold, but at least I admit it -- I'm here to help, whether or not anybody's actually listening this time...
JMR
Now, if only they'd bring MST3k back...
Amen! Ideally, they'd schedule it right. I'm glad to see that B5 will have an
easier to view time (OTOH, I'm starting to eye Replay & TiVo anyway).
JMR
I'll volunteer to supply a non-theoretical payment system option (no, not imagining ours would be the only one out there, but it works!). It's already possible to make sending e-mail cost something (only a proof of concept there, but it works!) and -- once again -- I'll click any Slashdot reader who asks me a small spot of e-gold to play with, so it's free (at first) and if you don't like it, you can ignore it. Last time nobody asked, but the offer is real.
JMR
Try a FREE account (no obligation, and we don't sell, trade, or give away information.)
Was this worth $.02? (Yep, this one works, too.)
...
OTOH, ebay-like auctions will survive -- search engines can't be fast enough and their users aren't easy to find, so auction sites will remain attractive, however even in that area single leader won't be able to survive.
Amazon also does auctions (though their auction site is obviously struggling compared to ebay). I think your main point is correct, though, more and more users will bypass Amazon's high prices and go with cheaper competition once they learn that they can find it easily.
JMR
(This is going to be unpopular, but) I agree. The judge (from the looks of things, I couldn't hit the ruling) is probably right for the wrong reason(s). Spam is an insoluble jurisdictional issue because Spam is an ECONOMIC issue. Many (not all!) in the anti-spam community might be described as a bit economics-challenged. This is not to poke fun at them, but just to say that follow-the-money applies when it comes to a group of lawyer-politicians proposing a nice-sounding anti-spam law (effectiveness be damned! It employs more lawyers!!!) just as when it comes to a spammer sending nasty ol' spam (and I agree, just about all people dislike UCE, including me).
/. community who asks for it a bit of gold to try the concept out. (I've made this offer on Slashdot in the past, with surprisingly few takers, but now there's a casino and a lottery) so I expect better results. Think about it, with a "stamp" that pays you, you might not mind spam so much. If you keep a Flying Rat e-mail address secret and "blocked" it will never get unpaid spam. The Flying Rat software will be open source, AFAIK.
The question becomes, what can be done that's actually effective? Plenty of laws can be written to sound good and they obviously don't work! (Disclaimer: Warning, the following is going to sound crass and commercial -- spam, if you will -- even though I'm about to offer to GIVE AWAY MONEY!! and I'm not imposing on anyone's e-mail bandwidth, so moderate me down and see if I care.)
Well, after last year's FC99 in Anguilla, and a number of conversations, we came up with The Flying Rat Project (the name comes from an old joke about never seeing baby pigeons, combined with the idea of pigeons carrying messages in ancient times). Yes, right now it only uses e-gold (that will change, this is a kludgy proof-of-concept, not what we have eventually planned) and yes, I dream about eventually making some money on the damthing (horrors! I'm not a lawyer who wants more laws just to make money for the chattering-class, I'm an evil-greedy-capitalist-Firengi-pig who wants there to be a market in e-mail and thinks that economics might -- just might -- work better than yet-another law!). Anyway, it works, and has for a while without much notice.
For now, I'll give anyone in the
Thanks for listening, you can create an account Here (please choose a good passphrase and remember it!) and then just e-mail me the account number and I'll click you a bit. For free (but try to play around with Flying Rat some, before you gamble it away). Thanks.
JMR
The decline of English teaching has coincided with the rise of the internet, and it's probably possible to get through "journalism school" and get hired without even being as good at writing as I am (and I'm not great, believe me). It's sad.
JMR