I have no doubt that it is advantageous to you as a vendor, but I utterly fail to see the advantage to me as a buyer
The advantage is quite obvious. PayPal brings more vendors to the immediate-fulfillment market than with only those who can process credit card orders in the game. Bringing more vendors to a market tilts the seller/buyer or supply-and-demand ratio, which should lead to lower prices according to standard micro-economic theory. So with PayPal you should potentially get have a choice of lower priced vendors.
Now even if the fraud risk is higher, the sales price might go down by more than enough to offset that risk. If the fraud rate is x%, but you can now get a y% lower price due to more competition between sellers, and y > x you will probably be ahead in the long run taking the risk. For example, if 1 in 10 beanie baby purchases via PayPal turns out fraudulent, but you're getting them at a 20% lower price than otherwise, then you will probably come out around 10% ahead in the long run even after writing off the fraudulent transactions. So think of using PayPal as a form of gambling, but with the odds potentially in your favor( if you can find enough good deals).
How are you going to handle payments and payment verification anonymously?
Very few people need to receive completely anonymous email (maybe rape crisis centers, police tip lines, and the like). So the load of filtering out spam created by the anonymous tragedy of the commons can be placed on only those with this special need.
For most of the rest of us, our long lost friends and business customers can afford the cost of some sort of e-stamp; and we can either whitelist the authentication method of, or forward some e-stamps to, our favorite impoverished mailing list.
And just how is a business supposed to determine whether a paying customer was brought in by the link or phone number in their magazine ads (etc.) vs. the *identical* link or phone number inside Joe job spam?
It appears that the U.S, like other countries, has still not gotten the idea it's going to be nearly impossible to legislate the internet.
The "internet" can't be regulated, but, if physically located inside US jurisdiction, the registrants and admins can be thrown in jail and the servers can be unplugged. That makes for defacto control of a big portion of the "net".
Not this particular service necessarily, but this method in general seems to be the standard method to hide ownership (maybe, IANAL). Big corporations get their law firm to incorporate a shell company in the Bahama's or Cayman, and the shell company then buys the property anonymous from the real source of the money. Add more levels of indirection and blind trusts for fancier schemes to hide assets from bankruptcy, lawsuits, divorce settlements, etc. Maybe even legally.
For a little privacy, all you need is money. Same should work for domain name "ownership".
I'm quite surprised that some law firm hasn't ambulance-chased down some random dDoS victim, traced the attack, and then sued a whole bunch of small companies and perhaps even rich homeowners where some of the actual 0wn3d bot PC's used for the dDoS resided (not MS of course; they have too big a legal dept to "settle"). Even minor contributory negligence seems to go a long way in injury lawsuits these days.
This would probably eventually have some effect on the size of bot nets residing within US legal jurisdiction.
politics.slashdot.org is rapidly turning into one of my least favorites because I've noticed that the moderation system is running amuck! Never before have I seen such a split in moderations where a single comment can be rated "informative" and "troll" numerous times in the same story.
This is a given in a single moderation system. It should oscillate chaotically. Even the meta-moderation might do so. The solution (for the mostly single dimensional politics in the US) is a dual moderation system. Moderators first rate their own views on a liberal-conservative scale, and then moderate a post. Moderation points should then accumulate to two scales. Biased moderation will then clearly show up when the two scales are diametrically opposed, instead of having to wait to observe the natural oscillation cycle. Readers can filter on one scale, the other, or both, depending on which biases they want to read.
A lot of parents (slashdotters included) have more years of college and higher test score than the average public school teacher. As well, the typical home rarely has as much peer pressure to do drugs and join gangs as do many city schools.
they get no interaction with other kids and are far too sheltered.
Many home schooled kids spend more time in social activities than do most public schooled kids, mostly church related, of course, and involving full families. Church music and sports programs for instance, for which the public schools have already cut funding.
But I do not think home schooling is the correct fix.
Home schooling is market competition for public schools, hopefully forcing them to compete (the voters eventually won't give them any money if they don't attract any students).
In the technical community, political views are too biased for uniform fair moderation. People without deep introspection are usually completely unaware of the degree of their own biases. The only fair scoring I've seen is from debate coaches, who have direct experience of both losing and winning arguments on both sides of any hot issue. Whereas the it would be an easy bet that the typical slashdot poster/moderator would lose a debate round against any competant high school debate team if they drew the side opposite their own natural bias in a scored tournament, given a complete lack of skill at recognizing good arguments on the other side of an issue.
So, I propose a dual moderation system (maybe quad moderation for libertarians?) where moderators first state how much they typically agree with a left/right point-of-view before scoring postings. Meta-moderation should keep the system from being gamed too often. Readers should then be able to filter out moderators with a given degree of opposite bias to their own (or not if they want to see the strongest balancing arguments). This will prevent infinite back-and-forth scoring from making moderation as useless as a chaotic oscillator (useless except for generating pseudo-random numbers that is).
There are other books indicting the US educational system, where politics are often more important than education. Try "Inside American Education" by Thomas Sowell (ISBN: 0029303303).
The sooner we get an education system which does not teach religion or political or patriotic based material the better.
If you read a bit on the history of publishing and education, you will find that both have a religious and political bias. We certainly don't any longer let the government choose what is fit to print. You can let the government choose the bias in k12 education, and end up with the homogeneous semi-leftist, semi-athiest mess we have now, or let the free market choose, in which case you might end up with a few more nut-case schools, but on average better schools with more (social, political, religious and methodological) variety because many parents will notice that the current status quo is a failure.
So what happens when China declares war against us 40 or 50 years from now?
If the current balance of trade deficit continues till then, they will have no need to invade. They will already own everything of value inside the country.
But what's really happening is this: incomes of a few CEOs go up from (say) $1M to $2M, while incomes of 10 times as many engineers go down from (say) $100k to $20k.
And those CEO don't just smoke (all of) the money. They might buy another monster trophy houses for instance, so 10 times as many construction contractors might see their incomes go from $20K to $100K. If you're an engineer instead of a carpenter, you just picked the wrong job out of the cash flow.
If Nike does better, all US-based employees of Nike, from execs down to janitors, benefit....is this because Nike has a profit sharing scheme where company profits are distributed and shared with employees???
The profit sharing scheme is simple: the janitor has a higher probability of keeping his job instead of getting laid off. Maybe Nike builds a bigger HQ building for the execs, which requires hiring some of the janitors friends. All those employees, from execs down to janitors, pay taxes, eat in local restaurants, shop in local grocery stores, buy or rent houses and apartments. etc. Perhaps the restaurant owner purchases a new cash register made by a American IT company.
The fact that the lampshade iMacs went out-of-production while there was still a demand portends a possible collectors market. The price might well go up.
What I want to know is, whatever happened to supply-side pricing.
Supply side pricing works if every and any company in the business is guaranteed to be profitable. But if there is a downside risk, you need an offsetting upside potential to get suppliers to enter the business. e.g. if 90% of software startups go bankrupt, then you need better than 10:1 payoff odds for any seed investing in the business to be a decent gamble. Supply side pricing rarely offers those odds outside of (mis)managed economies.
The Amiga hardware engineering team bought one of the very first Apple Lisa machines sold (used mostly for documentation). They had plenty of time to evaluate the Apple Lisa GUI well before the Amiga UI design was finished.
Frankly it sounds like companies would work better if they didn't have management.
This works great for small companies with one to a handful of employees. Once the problem scales, there are vanishingly few examples of any large ongoing endeavors sans management in the real world. Success becomes statistically unlikely. Even the success of linux is attributed in part to Linus's management skills.
HR departments? Somebody's got to push the (often legally required) paperwork.
The difficulty of developing a historically accurate emulation is not only in developing relatively a bug free software emulator, but in emulating all the bugs of the original historical hardware. All the hardware bugs may not only include known ones, but ones yet to be discovered or characterized.
Perhaps some historic item of software will be discovered at some point in the future which actually requires one of these undiscovered bugs to in order to function "properly". An interesting problem if the hardware (or at least a physical component accurate simulation) is no longer is available for examination.
A managers most important job is rarely to do real work. It's often more than a full time job to find, hire and retain smart talented and passionate individuals, to choose from among the many solutions offered by them, to get everybody supporting the chosen solution, and to run interference for them to make sure other managers (investors, etc.) don't get in their way.
If you're missing out on a solution that could save your company millions of dollars...
Solutions are often a dime-a-dozen. What's usually needed is a great solution and a person passionate enough about that solution to carry it through to completion over the bumpy path of reality. The type of leader who uses this technique is immediately looking for both.
If there are other equally competent IT people who are available and will work for your wage or less as well as supply off-duty access without reimbursement, you are screwed since you are replaceable.
If there are other employers in the area who will pay you your going rate plus obvious expenses, then think about leaving. Your employer will then be screwed when he finds out it will most likely cost even more to keep his systems up after you leave for greener pastures.
There really are a lot of institutions that trade derivatives, including over-the-counter contracts. As in any field of human endeavor, there are a few geniuses, a few complete fools, and the majority of more or less average players.
There are number who appear to be geniuses; the open question is to what degree this number of apparent geniuses differs from what the same total population of investors would produce due to randomized theories of future valuation.
The value of an option depends on...
This is one model; some of the above "geniuses" claim to profit by other models. Which model is correct? How does one know before one writes it into national law?
The valuation of any financial asset incorporates some forecast of the future.
However the value of an asset (say land) as actually carried on the books is often just the purchase price, ignoring any predictions of the current or future market price (although companies sometimes "write-down" good will value if the two valuations get too far out of whack).
The idea that stock options don't have a clear value will come as news to all the investment banks in the world that trade options, and have to mark their P&L accounts to market every day. Beginning with Fischer Black and Myron Scholes in 1973, there has been continuing work in developing models to value options.
Treating a way to model the value of an option with the actual value has caused many derivatives funds to go bankrupt. These options values have more in common with gambling odds over a very long term, and much less with the value of a specific company during a specific financial quarter.
Slashdot Mirror
The advantage is quite obvious. PayPal brings more vendors to the immediate-fulfillment market than with only those who can process credit card orders in the game. Bringing more vendors to a market tilts the seller/buyer or supply-and-demand ratio, which should lead to lower prices according to standard micro-economic theory. So with PayPal you should potentially get have a choice of lower priced vendors.
Now even if the fraud risk is higher, the sales price might go down by more than enough to offset that risk. If the fraud rate is x%, but you can now get a y% lower price due to more competition between sellers, and y > x you will probably be ahead in the long run taking the risk. For example, if 1 in 10 beanie baby purchases via PayPal turns out fraudulent, but you're getting them at a 20% lower price than otherwise, then you will probably come out around 10% ahead in the long run even after writing off the fraudulent transactions. So think of using PayPal as a form of gambling, but with the odds potentially in your favor( if you can find enough good deals).
Very few people need to receive completely anonymous email (maybe rape crisis centers, police tip lines, and the like). So the load of filtering out spam created by the anonymous tragedy of the commons can be placed on only those with this special need.
For most of the rest of us, our long lost friends and business customers can afford the cost of some sort of e-stamp; and we can either whitelist the authentication method of, or forward some e-stamps to, our favorite impoverished mailing list.
And just how is a business supposed to determine whether a paying customer was brought in by the link or phone number in their magazine ads (etc.) vs. the *identical* link or phone number inside Joe job spam?
The "internet" can't be regulated, but, if physically located inside US jurisdiction, the registrants and admins can be thrown in jail and the servers can be unplugged. That makes for defacto control of a big portion of the "net".
Not this particular service necessarily, but this method in general seems to be the standard method to hide ownership (maybe, IANAL). Big corporations get their law firm to incorporate a shell company in the Bahama's or Cayman, and the shell company then buys the property anonymous from the real source of the money. Add more levels of indirection and blind trusts for fancier schemes to hide assets from bankruptcy, lawsuits, divorce settlements, etc. Maybe even legally.
For a little privacy, all you need is money. Same should work for domain name "ownership".
I'm quite surprised that some law firm hasn't ambulance-chased down some random dDoS victim, traced the attack, and then sued a whole bunch of small companies and perhaps even rich homeowners where some of the actual 0wn3d bot PC's used for the dDoS resided (not MS of course; they have too big a legal dept to "settle"). Even minor contributory negligence seems to go a long way in injury lawsuits these days.
This would probably eventually have some effect on the size of bot nets residing within US legal jurisdiction.
This is a given in a single moderation system. It should oscillate chaotically. Even the meta-moderation might do so. The solution (for the mostly single dimensional politics in the US) is a dual moderation system. Moderators first rate their own views on a liberal-conservative scale, and then moderate a post. Moderation points should then accumulate to two scales. Biased moderation will then clearly show up when the two scales are diametrically opposed, instead of having to wait to observe the natural oscillation cycle. Readers can filter on one scale, the other, or both, depending on which biases they want to read.
A lot of parents (slashdotters included) have more years of college and higher test score than the average public school teacher. As well, the typical home rarely has as much peer pressure to do drugs and join gangs as do many city schools.
they get no interaction with other kids and are far too sheltered.
Many home schooled kids spend more time in social activities than do most public schooled kids, mostly church related, of course, and involving full families. Church music and sports programs for instance, for which the public schools have already cut funding.
But I do not think home schooling is the correct fix.
Home schooling is market competition for public schools, hopefully forcing them to compete (the voters eventually won't give them any money if they don't attract any students).
So, I propose a dual moderation system (maybe quad moderation for libertarians?) where moderators first state how much they typically agree with a left/right point-of-view before scoring postings. Meta-moderation should keep the system from being gamed too often. Readers should then be able to filter out moderators with a given degree of opposite bias to their own (or not if they want to see the strongest balancing arguments). This will prevent infinite back-and-forth scoring from making moderation as useless as a chaotic oscillator (useless except for generating pseudo-random numbers that is).
There are other books indicting the US educational system, where politics are often more important than education. Try "Inside American Education" by Thomas Sowell (ISBN: 0029303303).
If you read a bit on the history of publishing and education, you will find that both have a religious and political bias. We certainly don't any longer let the government choose what is fit to print. You can let the government choose the bias in k12 education, and end up with the homogeneous semi-leftist, semi-athiest mess we have now, or let the free market choose, in which case you might end up with a few more nut-case schools, but on average better schools with more (social, political, religious and methodological) variety because many parents will notice that the current status quo is a failure.
If the current balance of trade deficit continues till then, they will have no need to invade. They will already own everything of value inside the country.
And those CEO don't just smoke (all of) the money. They might buy another monster trophy houses for instance, so 10 times as many construction contractors might see their incomes go from $20K to $100K. If you're an engineer instead of a carpenter, you just picked the wrong job out of the cash flow.
The profit sharing scheme is simple: the janitor has a higher probability of keeping his job instead of getting laid off. Maybe Nike builds a bigger HQ building for the execs, which requires hiring some of the janitors friends. All those employees, from execs down to janitors, pay taxes, eat in local restaurants, shop in local grocery stores, buy or rent houses and apartments. etc. Perhaps the restaurant owner purchases a new cash register made by a American IT company.
The fact that the lampshade iMacs went out-of-production while there was still a demand portends a possible collectors market. The price might well go up.
Supply side pricing works if every and any company in the business is guaranteed to be profitable. But if there is a downside risk, you need an offsetting upside potential to get suppliers to enter the business. e.g. if 90% of software startups go bankrupt, then you need better than 10:1 payoff odds for any seed investing in the business to be a decent gamble. Supply side pricing rarely offers those odds outside of (mis)managed economies.
The Amiga hardware engineering team bought one of the very first Apple Lisa machines sold (used mostly for documentation). They had plenty of time to evaluate the Apple Lisa GUI well before the Amiga UI design was finished.
This works great for small companies with one to a handful of employees. Once the problem scales, there are vanishingly few examples of any large ongoing endeavors sans management in the real world. Success becomes statistically unlikely. Even the success of linux is attributed in part to Linus's management skills.
HR departments? Somebody's got to push the (often legally required) paperwork.
The difficulty of developing a historically accurate emulation is not only in developing relatively a bug free software emulator, but in emulating all the bugs of the original historical hardware. All the hardware bugs may not only include known ones, but ones yet to be discovered or characterized.
Perhaps some historic item of software will be discovered at some point in the future which actually requires one of these undiscovered bugs to in order to function "properly". An interesting problem if the hardware (or at least a physical component accurate simulation) is no longer is available for examination.
A managers most important job is rarely to do real work. It's often more than a full time job to find, hire and retain smart talented and passionate individuals, to choose from among the many solutions offered by them, to get everybody supporting the chosen solution, and to run interference for them to make sure other managers (investors, etc.) don't get in their way.
Solutions are often a dime-a-dozen. What's usually needed is a great solution and a person passionate enough about that solution to carry it through to completion over the bumpy path of reality. The type of leader who uses this technique is immediately looking for both.
Making statements like Stallman does is more confusing; maybe he's the one who should stop using the word "free" in such a bazarre manner.
If there are other employers in the area who will pay you your going rate plus obvious expenses, then think about leaving. Your employer will then be screwed when he finds out it will most likely cost even more to keep his systems up after you leave for greener pastures.
There are number who appear to be geniuses; the open question is to what degree this number of apparent geniuses differs from what the same total population of investors would produce due to randomized theories of future valuation.
The value of an option depends on ...
This is one model; some of the above "geniuses" claim to profit by other models. Which model is correct? How does one know before one writes it into national law?
The valuation of any financial asset incorporates some forecast of the future.
However the value of an asset (say land) as actually carried on the books is often just the purchase price, ignoring any predictions of the current or future market price (although companies sometimes "write-down" good will value if the two valuations get too far out of whack).
Treating a way to model the value of an option with the actual value has caused many derivatives funds to go bankrupt. These options values have more in common with gambling odds over a very long term, and much less with the value of a specific company during a specific financial quarter.