As for my star up example; do you really believe someone who puts all their money and time into creating a company shouldn't reap the benefits but that his or her payout should be limited based on some arbitrary number?
This isn't about owners, it's about CEOs and other execs. Owners get their rewards through their ownership of the company, in whole or part. CEOs are employees. Sometime they get shares or share options as part of their pay for being employees. But they are are CEOs not owners. Of course some times owners are CEOs. But it's not the ownership part of their rewards that is the topic of this ratio.
However, many CEO's are paid the really large dollars via options and stock grants so they are also owners. SO that is OK based on your statement.
Or they should be forced to give multi-million dollar payouts to everyone on staff?
No such forcing is being required. That would be the result of a very extraordinary minimum wage requirement, not a wage ratio. And of course in either case no normal company could end up that way. If money is redistributed from the execs to the ordinary workers, it gets split lots of ways, and will result in a reasonable rise, not the fantasy sized ones you suggest.
Except the Swiss proposal was 12x the lowest paid worker, not some combination of wages. The Swiss, being a sensible people, voted that down.
You're really not equating racial discrimination with CEO pay?
It's a ratio. It's not just about the highest paid, it's about the lowest paid. It's about the mix of salaries, and how it shouldn't unreasonably mostly go to those that are already in the top 1%.
However, that point wasn't about the equivalence of discrimination and pay disparity. Simply that the possibility of loopholes isn't a reason for not going ahead with otherwise good legislation.
So now you have to cover every loophole?
Huh? That doesn't follow at all.
How about startups that give huge stock options to some employees but not others? Should that be capped as well? Why should an owner / CEO get such a huge payday when the janitor gets a straight salary?
Why indeed?
How about a company that outsources manufacturing? Should all the salaries be capped since many regular wage owners could make significantly more than the lowest paid factory workers at an outsourced plant. How is that different form hiring a cleaning service?
These are issues that would have to be addressed when drafting a law. Few laws can be written on the back of a postage stamp.
Do you really think a company that would do that cares about the backlash?
There's plenty of companies that care about the backlash.
Rather than rely line by line here are my thoughts:
1. While the intent may be good it simply wouldn't be a good law because it is simply unworkable.Even the Swiss realized it was a bad idea and voted it down.
2. As for my star up example; do you really believe someone who puts all their money and time into creating a company shouldn't reap the benefits but that his or her payout should be limited based on some arbitrary number? Or they should be forced to give multi-million dollar payouts to everyone on staff?
The problem with such a law, while well intentioned would simply lead to people finding various ways around it and or simply reducing in house staff to avoid low limits. Quite frankly, even though I think some of the current way CEO pay is structured is counter productive I am not opposed to large CEO payouts.
Have to disagree. You can run MacOS on non-Apple hardware, and both Dell and HP laptops are crap.
Run, and run well, is two different things. Sure you can create a Hackintosh but expecting it to work just like a Mac without any issues and to be simple to update to the latest OS version and just have it work is not yet the case.
"Do you want to stick with OSX or are fine with a different OS?" If the former you are stuck. If the latter then decide on a feature set must haves and price point and buy what meets those needs. Dell, HP, Leveno all make good machines so it really comes down to what meets your needs.
In addition, it would make outsourcing lower end employees an attractive option.
If we didn't go ahead because of some predictable loopholes, then racial and sexual discrimination laws would never have happened either. And they have done a lot of good.
You're really not equating racial discrimination with CEO pay?
First of all the law would have to be drafted to deal with this potential loophole. For example, companies need cleaners and security staff, and they tend to be the lowest earners. It's not that hard to survey the people who are doing the cleaning and security at the company, even if they are employed indirectly via outsourcing.
So now you have to cover every loophole? How about startups that give huge stock options to some employees but not others? Should that be capped as well? Why should an owner / CEO get such a huge payday when the janitor gets a straight salary?
How about a company that outsources manufacturing? Should all the salaries be capped since many regular wage owners could make significantly more than the lowest paid factory workers at an outsourced plant. How is that different form hiring a cleaning service?
Secondly, companies can't do outsourcing of existing jobs in secret. And there are plenty of activist organisations that would be only to happy to out the behaviour. Organisations like Occupy Wall Street. Even if the CEO got away with some loophole legally, he and his company would still suffer the bad press as cheating their lowest paid workers.
Do you really think a company that would do that cares about the backlash?
Interestingly enough, the Swiss voted the law down.
You simply specify in the legislation that the total rewards package is to be considered. There's no rewards that cannot be evaluated for tax, so they can be evaluated for this too.
Actually there is non-taxable compensation; and if you make currently non-taxable items taxable that would impact employees across the board potentially. At any rate, providing similar benefits to lower paid employees would allow higher pay for executives since they could get dome multiple of the benefit in cash. In addition, it would make outsourcing lower end employees an attractive option.
I don't understand how any of that address the points I made but:
I believe it's a moral imperative to limit the maximum pay ratio, based on precisely the same factors you used to determine it was morally wrong (I assume, since you didn't list any). I also don't see it as a penalty for the rich any more than taxes are.
Perhaps more importantly I do not see how limiting the pay ratio is something that could be "extended to all of the country" with respect to limiting everyone's pay (or again, how that's fundamentally different than income tax) -- by definition a pay ratio limit only affects the highest pay rates.
Sorry - hit post too soon. In addition, it also means there is incentive to outsource the lowest paid wooers. target then hire them hire through a service rather than make them employees.
I don't understand how any of that address the points I made but:
I believe it's a moral imperative to limit the maximum pay ratio, based on precisely the same factors you used to determine it was morally wrong (I assume, since you didn't list any). I also don't see it as a penalty for the rich any more than taxes are.
Perhaps more importantly I do not see how limiting the pay ratio is something that could be "extended to all of the country" with respect to limiting everyone's pay (or again, how that's fundamentally different than income tax) -- by definition a pay ratio limit only affects the highest pay rates.
The question then becomes "what is pay?" You can simply substitute benefits and other compensation for pay.
“It’s very emotional in the United States,” said Benoit Debains, the chief executive of OnAir. He insisted that the anxiety was overblown. For one thing, he and other industry executives said, standard cabin noise covers up much conversational noise, yet people with cellphones pressed to their ears in that environment somehow do not feel the need to speak louder to compensate.
“I remember on the first flight we did, we asked one guy, ‘What do you think about using the phone for voice in the cabin?’ He said he was against it. But we said, ‘You know, the guy across from you has been using his phone for the last five minutes.’ ”
Emirates executives have even heard from skeptical pilots and flight attendants who mistakenly believed “the system was on but nobody was using it” on a particular flight, he said. “And I was able to go back to them and say, well 63 people had their phones on, and there were 22 phone calls and 68 messages.”
He added, “They were thinking it must be broken because they don’t hear anybody using it.”
Darn. Here I wa stinking of a new app that let you upload one side of the overheard conversation and create the other for humor, fun, and profit when you share it via Phoneagram (tm).
So basically, you don't have issues with cell phones on flights because your cell phone providers are so ridiculously over price that its a non-starter.
We don't have your roaming issue. You can be on a jet aircraft for 8 hours here and never leave your home area. There are no roaming fees in our country, which is likely larger than your entire continent.
There probably will be a roaming charge on planes because the airline will control the plane to tower link. More than likely they will lease out space on the aircraft, similar to the old Airphones that were in each armrests and cost a lot to use. The vendor will need to recoup the costs airline charge plus make a profit. I would even hazard to guess the phone company would simply add in a new feature they can charge for as well. Want to be able to use your phone on an airplane and pay a gazzlion dollars a minute? No problem, that's $5 a month for the "We charge that much because we can" add-on to your existing plan. They make money and avoid changing your plan T&Cs so you can't refuse the change and drop them without paying an early cancellation fee.
Physicists like to think they are smarter than everyone else, but they often make big fools of themselves on non-physics topics that require social intelligence.
A quick search of Amazon and eBay turns up quite a few "quick MBA" selections. Titles like:
The One-Day MBA
MBA in a Day: What You Would Learn at Top-Tier Business Schools
The Mobile MBA: 112 Skills to Take You Further, Faster 2012 -Man
The 10-Day MBA
Complete MBA For Dummies
I couldn't find anything remotely similar for a degree in physics.
What else you got?
Feynman's lectures. Seriuosly the real value of an MBA is in the network of alumns than many of the course.
I wonder who they'd feel if someone decided to send a steady stream of nonsense to their servers? And have field named "LG virus payload" "Trojan_LG" etc?
Why should you have roaming charges at all in the EU?
Because they can (different countries).
And different companies. I suspect that's really a larger part of the reason. In the US, don't you pay extra if your own provider is unreachable in some particular spot and your phone switches to one of the others?
In general no. Most have agreements in place to roam on each other's network, although they may limit data roam and do get upset if all you do is roam.
There are roaming cost limits in Europe. This means a maximum of 0.09 EUR per SMS. Not sure what the limits are for national calls, nor what it is for data, but the limits are reasonable within Europe.
I wonder if they will make exceptions depending on destination or if they find another way to add some extra cost to it.
Why should you have roaming charges at all in the EU? I can go from JFK to SFO and never pay a dime in roaming charges and text all I want.,/P>
Cue the US vs EU cell phone market pricing flame war...
Yeah, as if flying wasn't annoying enough I now have to listen to the person next to me talk on the phone for the entire flight? Roaming chargers will negate some of that I'm sure, but given that EU has also suggested that those charges should be drastically lowered as well... yeeeah, what can possibly go wrong?
I envision a whole new web game - guess the other side of the conversation. Record you seat mate's half of the call, and let imaginations run wild...
and they can disable it at any time, as owners are they liable for any damage it may cause? So when my Zoe leaves me for someone else and Renault fails to disable the charging and said new person is at fault in a serious accident, how long will it take for someone to argue Renault was at least partially at fault since they fails dot take action in a timely manner?
This is obnoxious but not entirely new. My 2005 volvo has a 'feature' where the power steering pump can only be changed by volvo as the software 'needs an update' before the car will start again. Can't even have another garage do it, you need the volvo computers.
I guess it is just a way to ensure the dealership garages stay in business.
BMW does this as well. Cost of new battery:$145 Cost of putting it in and programming car for new battery: $400 Buying aftermarket programing kit for $180 and DIY: Priceless (sort of)
...I can use medicine longer than is safe (expired) and kill myself and a lot of people....
The 'expired' date on medicines (and food) does NOT give a time after which they are unsafe to use.
Please concentrate, because this is slightly non-intuitive. The manufactures lobbied, not to provide this, but to provide a time UP TO WHICH it had been tested to be safe.
Now, those two times may be very similar for cases where an item spoils quickly - a cake or bread, for instance. But in many cases medicines (or food) can last essentially unchanged for many decades. In those cases a manufacturer will NOT test for several decades and try to find the maximum shelf life, but will test for, say, 5 years. That's a reasonable length of time, and he will be very happy if after 5 years a warehouse has to throw away perfectly good items which would have lasted another 15 years, and buy some new produce from him again.
If you are using something with an outdated shelf-life, consider the chemistry. For instance, a sealed jar of sodium bicarbonate isn't going to go 'off' even if it's 100 years old...
The US military has a program to test how long medicine is still effective after expiration. Since they typically stockpile significant amounts, it is expensive to throw out perfectly good, but past date, medicine. Not only do they need to buy more but they need to then ship it to warehouses around the work.
Not surprisingly, some of it from a PR perspective, i.e.e "We're giving our troops outdated medicine;" but also because it represents a revenue loss for suppliers. If ^H^H When the data leaks to the general populace their will be a push to take advantage of it; further cutting revenue as well as opening up manufacturers to lawsuits.
I am reminded of a scene from The Wire where Bunk et. al. load a copy machine with paper saying True True Lie and run a "lie Detector test" on a suspect.
After they say the machine don't miss the suspect confesses. In a similar vein, as long as people *think* a polygraph works, the questioning is more important than the results. If people will openly reveal information think the test will catch lies or deception then in a sense the work since they help uncover potentially damaging information.
Sadly piracy is accepted as the norm, even when publishers are practically giving stuff away for free. People just share stuff, they dont think about what goes into creating the stuff they are sharing, they dont think that people need to make money from what they create in order to pay bills and mortgages.
Oddly enough some of the worst offenders also create their own electronic material. I did work for a company who used other's material without permission and when I asked was told "it's on the internet so it's free to use." Right. I remember that from business law class, the doctrine of free to steal; well established in case and common law. Of course, *there* material was heavily DRM'd to the point all it did was upset the paying customers. In a fit of karmic brilliance their material is also "on the internet" so I guess it's free to use as well.
I've given up on trying to DRM my material. I make sure my copyright and contact information is on it and send people who ask for it a simple pdf. I figure the real value is in my experience and skills in how I do it not how to do it. Or, as I put it, you're not paying me to hit the machine with a hammer, you pay me to know where to hit the machine with the hammer.
Cell phone HTTP accesses from my cell phone provider are always forced though a transparent HTTP proxy. This means many thousands of accounts are normally accessed via the same IP address.
Which is largely irrelevant because the point is not to identify individuals but patterns; IP addresses are merely one data point from many.
(When the Bronze Behaviour Discriminator fails as the spammers step up their game in this arms race, will people have to upgrade to the Silver Behaviour Discriminator?)
Actually, your target is not the bot creators but the users of the output. These aren't run of the mill spammers but real companies who are paying for a service and who have an interest in what is delivered because their name is attached. If Twitter followers becomes an unreliable way to determine value, and hence price; the buyers will stop buying. It's a demand side solution.
Slashdot Mirror
As for my star up example; do you really believe someone who puts all their money and time into creating a company shouldn't reap the benefits but that his or her payout should be limited based on some arbitrary number?
This isn't about owners, it's about CEOs and other execs. Owners get their rewards through their ownership of the company, in whole or part. CEOs are employees. Sometime they get shares or share options as part of their pay for being employees. But they are are CEOs not owners. Of course some times owners are CEOs. But it's not the ownership part of their rewards that is the topic of this ratio.
However, many CEO's are paid the really large dollars via options and stock grants so they are also owners. SO that is OK based on your statement.
Or they should be forced to give multi-million dollar payouts to everyone on staff?
No such forcing is being required. That would be the result of a very extraordinary minimum wage requirement, not a wage ratio. And of course in either case no normal company could end up that way. If money is redistributed from the execs to the ordinary workers, it gets split lots of ways, and will result in a reasonable rise, not the fantasy sized ones you suggest.
Except the Swiss proposal was 12x the lowest paid worker, not some combination of wages. The Swiss, being a sensible people, voted that down.
You're really not equating racial discrimination with CEO pay?
It's a ratio. It's not just about the highest paid, it's about the lowest paid. It's about the mix of salaries, and how it shouldn't unreasonably mostly go to those that are already in the top 1%.
However, that point wasn't about the equivalence of discrimination and pay disparity. Simply that the possibility of loopholes isn't a reason for not going ahead with otherwise good legislation.
So now you have to cover every loophole?
Huh? That doesn't follow at all.
How about startups that give huge stock options to some employees but not others? Should that be capped as well? Why should an owner / CEO get such a huge payday when the janitor gets a straight salary?
Why indeed?
How about a company that outsources manufacturing? Should all the salaries be capped since many regular wage owners could make significantly more than the lowest paid factory workers at an outsourced plant. How is that different form hiring a cleaning service?
These are issues that would have to be addressed when drafting a law. Few laws can be written on the back of a postage stamp.
Do you really think a company that would do that cares about the backlash?
There's plenty of companies that care about the backlash.
Rather than rely line by line here are my thoughts:
1. While the intent may be good it simply wouldn't be a good law because it is simply unworkable.Even the Swiss realized it was a bad idea and voted it down.
2. As for my star up example; do you really believe someone who puts all their money and time into creating a company shouldn't reap the benefits but that his or her payout should be limited based on some arbitrary number? Or they should be forced to give multi-million dollar payouts to everyone on staff?
The problem with such a law, while well intentioned would simply lead to people finding various ways around it and or simply reducing in house staff to avoid low limits. Quite frankly, even though I think some of the current way CEO pay is structured is counter productive I am not opposed to large CEO payouts.
Have to disagree. You can run MacOS on non-Apple hardware, and both Dell and HP laptops are crap.
Run, and run well, is two different things. Sure you can create a Hackintosh but expecting it to work just like a Mac without any issues and to be simple to update to the latest OS version and just have it work is not yet the case.
***cough*** Hackintosh ***cough***
While it is absolution it really isn't a mainstream solution; but rather as the name implies a hacker's toy.
"Do you want to stick with OSX or are fine with a different OS?" If the former you are stuck. If the latter then decide on a feature set must haves and price point and buy what meets those needs. Dell, HP, Leveno all make good machines so it really comes down to what meets your needs.
In addition, it would make outsourcing lower end employees an attractive option.
If we didn't go ahead because of some predictable loopholes, then racial and sexual discrimination laws would never have happened either. And they have done a lot of good.
You're really not equating racial discrimination with CEO pay?
First of all the law would have to be drafted to deal with this potential loophole. For example, companies need cleaners and security staff, and they tend to be the lowest earners. It's not that hard to survey the people who are doing the cleaning and security at the company, even if they are employed indirectly via outsourcing.
So now you have to cover every loophole? How about startups that give huge stock options to some employees but not others? Should that be capped as well? Why should an owner / CEO get such a huge payday when the janitor gets a straight salary?
How about a company that outsources manufacturing? Should all the salaries be capped since many regular wage owners could make significantly more than the lowest paid factory workers at an outsourced plant. How is that different form hiring a cleaning service?
Secondly, companies can't do outsourcing of existing jobs in secret. And there are plenty of activist organisations that would be only to happy to out the behaviour. Organisations like Occupy Wall Street. Even if the CEO got away with some loophole legally, he and his company would still suffer the bad press as cheating their lowest paid workers.
Do you really think a company that would do that cares about the backlash?
Interestingly enough, the Swiss voted the law down.
You simply specify in the legislation that the total rewards package is to be considered. There's no rewards that cannot be evaluated for tax, so they can be evaluated for this too.
Actually there is non-taxable compensation; and if you make currently non-taxable items taxable that would impact employees across the board potentially. At any rate, providing similar benefits to lower paid employees would allow higher pay for executives since they could get dome multiple of the benefit in cash. In addition, it would make outsourcing lower end employees an attractive option.
I don't understand how any of that address the points I made but: I believe it's a moral imperative to limit the maximum pay ratio, based on precisely the same factors you used to determine it was morally wrong (I assume, since you didn't list any). I also don't see it as a penalty for the rich any more than taxes are.
Perhaps more importantly I do not see how limiting the pay ratio is something that could be "extended to all of the country" with respect to limiting everyone's pay (or again, how that's fundamentally different than income tax) -- by definition a pay ratio limit only affects the highest pay rates.
Sorry - hit post too soon. In addition, it also means there is incentive to outsource the lowest paid wooers. target then hire them hire through a service rather than make them employees.
I don't understand how any of that address the points I made but: I believe it's a moral imperative to limit the maximum pay ratio, based on precisely the same factors you used to determine it was morally wrong (I assume, since you didn't list any). I also don't see it as a penalty for the rich any more than taxes are.
Perhaps more importantly I do not see how limiting the pay ratio is something that could be "extended to all of the country" with respect to limiting everyone's pay (or again, how that's fundamentally different than income tax) -- by definition a pay ratio limit only affects the highest pay rates.
The question then becomes "what is pay?" You can simply substitute benefits and other compensation for pay.
Or not
“It’s very emotional in the United States,” said Benoit Debains, the chief executive of OnAir. He insisted that the anxiety was overblown. For one thing, he and other industry executives said, standard cabin noise covers up much conversational noise, yet people with cellphones pressed to their ears in that environment somehow do not feel the need to speak louder to compensate.
“I remember on the first flight we did, we asked one guy, ‘What do you think about using the phone for voice in the cabin?’ He said he was against it. But we said, ‘You know, the guy across from you has been using his phone for the last five minutes.’ ”
Emirates executives have even heard from skeptical pilots and flight attendants who mistakenly believed “the system was on but nobody was using it” on a particular flight, he said. “And I was able to go back to them and say, well 63 people had their phones on, and there were 22 phone calls and 68 messages.”
He added, “They were thinking it must be broken because they don’t hear anybody using it.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/09/29/technology/29phones.html
Darn. Here I wa stinking of a new app that let you upload one side of the overheard conversation and create the other for humor, fun, and profit when you share it via Phoneagram (tm).
So basically, you don't have issues with cell phones on flights because your cell phone providers are so ridiculously over price that its a non-starter.
We don't have your roaming issue. You can be on a jet aircraft for 8 hours here and never leave your home area. There are no roaming fees in our country, which is likely larger than your entire continent.
There probably will be a roaming charge on planes because the airline will control the plane to tower link. More than likely they will lease out space on the aircraft, similar to the old Airphones that were in each armrests and cost a lot to use. The vendor will need to recoup the costs airline charge plus make a profit. I would even hazard to guess the phone company would simply add in a new feature they can charge for as well. Want to be able to use your phone on an airplane and pay a gazzlion dollars a minute? No problem, that's $5 a month for the "We charge that much because we can" add-on to your existing plan. They make money and avoid changing your plan T&Cs so you can't refuse the change and drop them without paying an early cancellation fee.
How exactly is that new? https://www.keytrac.net/ http://www.intensityanalytics.com/ http://www.idcontrol.com/keystrokeid And there is like half a dozen more.
More to the point, telegraph operators and hams have recognized "fists" for quite some time; so at least there is prior art.
Physicists like to think they are smarter than everyone else, but they often make big fools of themselves on non-physics topics that require social intelligence.
A quick search of Amazon and eBay turns up quite a few "quick MBA" selections. Titles like:
The One-Day MBA MBA in a Day: What You Would Learn at Top-Tier Business Schools The Mobile MBA: 112 Skills to Take You Further, Faster 2012 -Man The 10-Day MBA Complete MBA For Dummies
I couldn't find anything remotely similar for a degree in physics.
What else you got?
Feynman's lectures. Seriuosly the real value of an MBA is in the network of alumns than many of the course.
I wonder who they'd feel if someone decided to send a steady stream of nonsense to their servers? And have field named "LG virus payload" "Trojan_LG" etc?
First a new kind of SCIENCE, now a new kind of PROGRAMMING.
Can't wait for a new kind of LOVE.
Given the challenges many face with the old kind I doubt we are ready to face a new kind...
And different companies. I suspect that's really a larger part of the reason. In the US, don't you pay extra if your own provider is unreachable in some particular spot and your phone switches to one of the others?
In general no. Most have agreements in place to roam on each other's network, although they may limit data roam and do get upset if all you do is roam.
There are roaming cost limits in Europe. This means a maximum of 0.09 EUR per SMS. Not sure what the limits are for national calls, nor what it is for data, but the limits are reasonable within Europe.
I wonder if they will make exceptions depending on destination or if they find another way to add some extra cost to it.
Why should you have roaming charges at all in the EU? I can go from JFK to SFO and never pay a dime in roaming charges and text all I want.,/P>
Cue the US vs EU cell phone market pricing flame war...
Yeah, as if flying wasn't annoying enough I now have to listen to the person next to me talk on the phone for the entire flight? Roaming chargers will negate some of that I'm sure, but given that EU has also suggested that those charges should be drastically lowered as well... yeeeah, what can possibly go wrong?
I envision a whole new web game - guess the other side of the conversation. Record you seat mate's half of the call, and let imaginations run wild...
and they can disable it at any time, as owners are they liable for any damage it may cause? So when my Zoe leaves me for someone else and Renault fails to disable the charging and said new person is at fault in a serious accident, how long will it take for someone to argue Renault was at least partially at fault since they fails dot take action in a timely manner?
This is obnoxious but not entirely new. My 2005 volvo has a 'feature' where the power steering pump can only be changed by volvo as the software 'needs an update' before the car will start again. Can't even have another garage do it, you need the volvo computers.
I guess it is just a way to ensure the dealership garages stay in business.
BMW does this as well. Cost of new battery:$145 Cost of putting it in and programming car for new battery: $400 Buying aftermarket programing kit for $180 and DIY: Priceless (sort of)
The 'expired' date on medicines (and food) does NOT give a time after which they are unsafe to use.
Please concentrate, because this is slightly non-intuitive. The manufactures lobbied, not to provide this, but to provide a time UP TO WHICH it had been tested to be safe.
Now, those two times may be very similar for cases where an item spoils quickly - a cake or bread, for instance. But in many cases medicines (or food) can last essentially unchanged for many decades. In those cases a manufacturer will NOT test for several decades and try to find the maximum shelf life, but will test for, say, 5 years. That's a reasonable length of time, and he will be very happy if after 5 years a warehouse has to throw away perfectly good items which would have lasted another 15 years, and buy some new produce from him again.
If you are using something with an outdated shelf-life, consider the chemistry. For instance, a sealed jar of sodium bicarbonate isn't going to go 'off' even if it's 100 years old...
The US military has a program to test how long medicine is still effective after expiration. Since they typically stockpile significant amounts, it is expensive to throw out perfectly good, but past date, medicine. Not only do they need to buy more but they need to then ship it to warehouses around the work.
Not surprisingly, some of it from a PR perspective, i.e.e "We're giving our troops outdated medicine;" but also because it represents a revenue loss for suppliers. If ^H^H When the data leaks to the general populace their will be a push to take advantage of it; further cutting revenue as well as opening up manufacturers to lawsuits.
I am reminded of a scene from The Wire where Bunk et. al. load a copy machine with paper saying True True Lie and run a "lie Detector test" on a suspect.
After they say the machine don't miss the suspect confesses. In a similar vein, as long as people *think* a polygraph works, the questioning is more important than the results. If people will openly reveal information think the test will catch lies or deception then in a sense the work since they help uncover potentially damaging information.
Sadly piracy is accepted as the norm, even when publishers are practically giving stuff away for free. People just share stuff, they dont think about what goes into creating the stuff they are sharing, they dont think that people need to make money from what they create in order to pay bills and mortgages.
Oddly enough some of the worst offenders also create their own electronic material. I did work for a company who used other's material without permission and when I asked was told "it's on the internet so it's free to use." Right. I remember that from business law class, the doctrine of free to steal; well established in case and common law. Of course, *there* material was heavily DRM'd to the point all it did was upset the paying customers. In a fit of karmic brilliance their material is also "on the internet" so I guess it's free to use as well.
I've given up on trying to DRM my material. I make sure my copyright and contact information is on it and send people who ask for it a simple pdf. I figure the real value is in my experience and skills in how I do it not how to do it. Or, as I put it, you're not paying me to hit the machine with a hammer, you pay me to know where to hit the machine with the hammer.
Cell phone HTTP accesses from my cell phone provider are always forced though a transparent HTTP proxy. This means many thousands of accounts are normally accessed via the same IP address.
Which is largely irrelevant because the point is not to identify individuals but patterns; IP addresses are merely one data point from many.
Yes, you are definitely a consultant.
(When the Bronze Behaviour Discriminator fails as the spammers step up their game in this arms race, will people have to upgrade to the Silver Behaviour Discriminator?)
Actually, your target is not the bot creators but the users of the output. These aren't run of the mill spammers but real companies who are paying for a service and who have an interest in what is delivered because their name is attached. If Twitter followers becomes an unreliable way to determine value, and hence price; the buyers will stop buying. It's a demand side solution.