It can't just be $10K to the FIRST person to track them down. Otherwise, it's just a $10K license to spam. Once you pay the fee, you'd be free to spam all you want.
The real problem with this, however, is that spam is a volume based business. On a 10megabit line you can push spam to hundreds, if not thousands, of recipient a second (With a 2K message, this would give a theoretical maximum of 500 transmits/megabyte. With 20 recipients/transmit that would be ~10,000 recipients/second). If only one of those thousands of people is going to get the $10K, it's going to be like playing the lottery to get a bounty -- In other words, not worth it.
Far better than that would be $100/message recieved by a user with no limit on the number of fines. That way, a person would know that they would get some value from hunting down a spammer. Given that I get, perhaps, a dozen spams per day, tracking down a handfull of spammers each afternoon would keep me well fed.
Obviously you haven't had your "But I thought the media was unbiased" epiphany yet. Having been in, and around newsmaking situations on a reasonably irregular basis, I no longer condider any media unbiased.
About the biggest difference between the New York Times and the Marxist-Lenninist Reporter or Xtra-West (a Vancouver Gay-community weekly) is that the latter two their heart on their sleeve: They all but scream "This is our bias! Read it with a pinch of your favorite offsetting spices" (OK: That would be the Xtra-West way of saying it: the MLR would probably say "read it or die with the proletariat hordes when the revolution hits" -- but I digress)
The New York Times has it's bias. People know, more or less, what it is -- but professional journalists are trained to write in impersonal (i.e. unbiased) style. It's religiously unspoken and unwritten. Like the elephant in the fridge, It's only realy noticed it when it leaves it's footprints in the butter.
Maybe they could actually do something positive and once a week post about the ongoing efforts to combat it.
yro.slashdot.org is pretty much what you're asking for -- except for the fact that it doesn't limit itself to once a week.
In truth, this is going to be a marketing issue. If the market buys it, it's gonne be with us forever. If the market avoids it like the plague (which I expect, and which I expect to encourage), then it's going to die a quiet and ignoble death.
I can just see it now:
A: Hey! The new Brittany Spears album is out, -- but you can't play it on your 2 year old CD player, You can't lend it out more than 3 times, and you can't copy it to your MP3 player.
B: Yeuch. I think I'll just buy a 'Red Hot Chilli Dogs' CD instead.
It happened 20 years ago with game copy protection. It happened 10 years ago with business software copy protection. It happened 5 years ago with the copy-protected competetor to DVDs. It's happening today by pushing people away from Windows and onto Linux.
Microsoft's recent licensing Gestapo tactics are probably one of the best things to have happened to Linux in a long time.
(( BTW: 'Red Hot Chill Dogs' is a band put together by a friend of mine. Their most memorable piece of music work was an investigation into the difference between punk rock and pokka (speed and volume). ))
This image which I found while trying to find the proper link for the next article (about 128M graphics cards) might be an example of what they're hoping for in the next generatoin of systems admins....
....the number of IT workers required globally to support a billion people and millions of firms connected via the Internet--possible within the next decade--may be over 200m....
The Europeans later developed the control surfaces known as ailerons to get around patents that the Wright Brothers had made....
So what you are saying is that superior technology was ditched because of patent/legal issues? Wow. That's a first...
Now that you mention...
I think that it was kinda like the apple/MS thing: The inferior system was used by many people because it was cheaper. Then, after years, it got to the point where so many people were using the inferior system (and managed to tweak it into doing so many interesting things) that the herd mentality took over -- people started to think that if so many people are using it, it must be the best. After that, they started to forget about the other (possibly inherently better) system.
Now with OS software, the same thing is happening (possibly) again -- but windows is losing market because it is not only more proprietary: It's also inferior
They're saying that, to handle 1Billion people online, we'd need 200K admins to handle it... That's 1 admin per 5 users. That's pretty high (unless they're all running Wintendos, of course, in which case support costs are pretty much open-ended).
I don't think that they're all going to be running Microsoft, though. MS is too expensive -- both in terms of licensing costs and hardware requirements. To get 1 billion people online, you're going to have at least half of them with low enough income that the costs of a Microsoft license and the hardware needed to run it is going to be prohibitive.
Even if the direct costs weren't prohibitive, 5-1 support ratios (if that's even close to accurate for Windows) probably would be.
It wasn't entirely a joke. I remember seeing the comment being used in the early days of usenet (about the time of the 'great split' from.net to.sci/soc/alt/etc).
It was a conversation about sending data physically as opposed to electronically. The comment about
"Never underestimate the bandwidth of a station wagon full of mag'tapes" came up, and the conversation then diverted into the distinction of bandwidth vs latency.
(I just wish I could remember the proper domain name for Deja-vue, now).
Remember they're not your bosses any more. It's completely legitimate to negotiate the terms of this thing.
The "don't sue us" clause may just be a standard 'cover my ass' thing, or it may be that they believe that you could get alot more from them if you did sue. You may want to talk to a lawyer, but I'd say that there's not much reason to not sign if/when you have absolutely no intention to sue them.
Remember: The severence package is an offer. It's a negotiating tactic. You can accept it as is, or you can negotiate something a bit better or you can even hire a lawyer and go the legal route.
I don't know what the other terms of the contract are, but if they're asking you to go above and beyond the call of duty as an EX employee (notice the emphasis on EX-), then you're completely within your rights to ask them to pay you for the favour -- or refuse it outright. Payment for the favour should be in addition to what they owe you, generally, in severance.
Re:So, let me get this straight
on
Skydriving
·
· Score: 1
A greyhound would cost a good deal more than $15k. Even a used and decrepit Greyhound would probably cost more than that (not to mention the cleanup after it hit). Buying insurance for a 'live' greyhound on a jump like that with parachutes would also probably cost about the same (if not more).
The $15K is for dropping a car from the cargo plane they already have access to. A Greyhound would (as the article mentioned) require a C5. I have no idea what it would cost to rent a C5, and I don't have the money to find out.
Oops (been there done that)
on
Skydriving
·
· Score: 1
That's what I get for posting before I read the article.
They should talk to GM or Ford
on
Skydriving
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
I'm sure that any of the big 3 auto manufacturers would jump (excuse the pun) at the chance to put a paratrooping SUV into their adds. $15K/jump would be a pitttance to them. You might even have to raise your price just to get their attention.
The last time I told someone that a bunch of little green (and other colored people helped me put something together, it took me 3 weeks to get out of observation.
From
late in the article: Another reason for the breakdown is the hypnotizing effect of reputation. When the names of eminent people and places appear on the top of submitted papers, says Florida physicist Hebard, "reviewers react almost unconsciously" to their prestige. "People discount reports from groups that aren't well known,"
One thing that could be done to cut down on prejudice within at least this part of the review process would be to remove names and other identifying information (like institution) from papers before they get sent out for review. This would allow work to be judged a bit more on it's merits and a bit less on it's authors.
Such a change migh both slow down frauds like Schon's and also allow new ideas more easily into the public realm. Papers don't just get erroneously passed based on name. Sometimes otherwise good papers can be rejected based on the fact that the author is either unkown or out of favour. Anonymous peer review would help mute both of those effects.
Microsoft's DRM patent isn't just on the use of DRM generally. It's for starting with DRM from scratch -- with signatures on your CPU, boot prom, kernel, etc.
I.E. You won't be able to sneeze without a digital signature on your handkerchief -- and if you don't use a handkerchief, they'll just plug your nose.
If Microsoft manages to get a broad DRM patent, it will encourage them to implement such a system. I'm reasonably sure that their interest in doing this is to lock Linux out of the media display market.
If they're either denied a patent altogether or locked down to a patent so narrow that other (reasonable?) solutions would be doable, I'm betting that they won't go in that direction. An unpatented DRM system would simply drive people away from MS-Windows in droves. This is something that MS might know better than to do. If they don't know better, then it would at least be a bonus for vendors of other operating systems (including Open Software solutions).
I'm also worried about their patent. As much as I hate the idea of DRM, I see their patent as a method of attacking Linux. It could allow them to lock OS programmers out of an entire region of programming. I think that it would be a good idea for Free Software advocates to take a look at their patent and see if there are things like prior art that would nullify it.
Far easier to convince the PTO to not issue a patent than to defend ourselves against a claim of patent infringement 5 years down the road. If Microsoft gets a pre-emptive lock on crytpographically secure systems, they'll forever (ok, for the next few decades) prevent OS programmers from doing the same thing.
Even just forcing them to tighten their patent application would give us more breathing room in the future.
Lenin was overthrown by Stalin.
Stalinism != Communism
Canada used to have a pretty strong Marxist/Leninist communist movement -- they used to heap scorn on Stain.
The biggest difference between Stalinist communism and end-game Capitalism is how obvious it is who controls the monopoly. With exponential corporate mergers we're getting pretty close to the centrally planned economy model with only the thinest veneer of free market covering it.
Another way of putting it: Under Stalinism, the government controls the businesses. Under present-day Captitalism, it's the other way 'round.
And that led to the final point. What about getting images on CD from the photographer?
Know that if you do this, you will probably never get another penny from your work this weekend -- no matter how many reprints I actually want and no matter what I want to do with them.
(
The people who want to go this path are usually the people who would normally be ordering a huge number of prints... i.e. the big spenders).
... and in my opinion, it has always been wrong. The photographer charges less for her time than it's worth, but tries to make up for it in overpriced photographic prints. That business model is almost as flawed as "We take a loss in every sale, but we make up for it in volume!"
It works socially: Everybody wants a good wedding photographer, but not everybody has the money. In the old business model, the people who want (and can afford) 7 copies of every picture and a 36"x54" blowup effectively subsidize the peole who can only afford a couple of 5x7s and one 8x10 formal.
For a photographer who does the photos for the cheap/broke couple, there is some hope that the happy couple will be able to afford a few more copies some years down the road.
An argument can be made for releasing programs as open source. It's not altruistic. Other people will take my code, improve it and (directly or indirectly) the new and improved code will come back to me and improve my life.
If you pay me to take a picture, this is not the case. If you take my pictures and generate reprints etc. I will generally get zero benefit from this -- other than (perhaps) a referral, if you are religious about including contact information with all copies of my pictures.
As such, paying for rights to a photo are like paying a programmer on contract to do a program and then give you the rights to that program closed source ({,s}he will never see any future benefit from it). What would you charge me to do that with your source code?
We run into a marketing problem here, too. People often want a wedding photographer for cheap... A wedding photographer often has to bid low, and then makes their real profit off of reprints, etc. If you want their work 'open source' then it's appropriate to pay for the copyright on the pictures (i.e. something akin to what would be charged for a reasonable number of reprints with current marketing methods).
You can't have it both ways. Either pay for a cheap photographer and then prices for reprints, or pay for the full package, including unlimited reprints. If I tried to hire a high-quality programmer for $15/hour for a short contract and then expected to own copyright on the result, I'd be laughed out of most contracters' offices -- and I'd be worried about the quality of the work of anybody who accepted my proposition.
oops: Re:Mishap Central: My parents.
on
When Users Attack
·
· Score: 2, Funny
My bad.. Your parents screamed for you. They screamed at me. Problem was that I liked to fix things, so I'd happily and quietly fix whatever was broken -- not bothering to dodge the blame, because most of the time, I was too thick-skinned to realize that blame was being attached to me.
Tonight, 20 years later, I finally figured it out.
Re:Mishap Central: My parents.
on
When Users Attack
·
· Score: 2, Funny
Since that time, my parents have learned to scream for me whenever something goes wrong..... And it doesn't stop when you leave home, either.
It did for me. My dad died when I was young, so it was just me, my mom and my three sisters. I got blamed whenever anything went wrong (I was often the only one who could fix it.. SOmetimes I confused blame with a simple request to fix, and didn't bother to say anything).
In any case, I went to a boarding school for grades 7 thru 10. Sometime around grade 9, one sister remarked to me.
You know how we used to blame you whenever anything broke? Well now that you're at boarding school we've noticed that things still keep breaking, but you're not around to blame any more...
The only thing that surprised me about that was the fact that it took them almost 3 years to figure it out.
Slashdot Mirror
The real problem with this, however, is that spam is a volume based business. On a 10megabit line you can push spam to hundreds, if not thousands, of recipient a second (With a 2K message, this would give a theoretical maximum of 500 transmits/megabyte. With 20 recipients/transmit that would be ~10,000 recipients/second). If only one of those thousands of people is going to get the $10K, it's going to be like playing the lottery to get a bounty -- In other words, not worth it.
Far better than that would be $100/message recieved by a user with no limit on the number of fines. That way, a person would know that they would get some value from hunting down a spammer. Given that I get, perhaps, a dozen spams per day, tracking down a handfull of spammers each afternoon would keep me well fed.
About the biggest difference between the New York Times and the Marxist-Lenninist Reporter or Xtra-West (a Vancouver Gay-community weekly) is that the latter two their heart on their sleeve: They all but scream "This is our bias! Read it with a pinch of your favorite offsetting spices" (OK: That would be the Xtra-West way of saying it: the MLR would probably say "read it or die with the proletariat hordes when the revolution hits" -- but I digress)
The New York Times has it's bias. People know, more or less, what it is -- but professional journalists are trained to write in impersonal (i.e. unbiased) style. It's religiously unspoken and unwritten. Like the elephant in the fridge, It's only realy noticed it when it leaves it's footprints in the butter.
yro.slashdot.org is pretty much what you're asking for -- except for the fact that it doesn't limit itself to once a week.
In truth, this is going to be a marketing issue. If the market buys it, it's gonne be with us forever. If the market avoids it like the plague (which I expect, and which I expect to encourage), then it's going to die a quiet and ignoble death.
I can just see it now:
It happened 20 years ago with game copy protection. It happened 10 years ago with business software copy protection. It happened 5 years ago with the copy-protected competetor to DVDs. It's happening today by pushing people away from Windows and onto Linux.
Microsoft's recent licensing Gestapo tactics are probably one of the best things to have happened to Linux in a long time.
(( BTW: 'Red Hot Chill Dogs' is a band put together by a friend of mine. Their most memorable piece of music work was an investigation into the difference between punk rock and pokka (speed and volume). ))
This image which I found while trying to find the proper link for the next article (about 128M graphics cards) might be an example of what they're hoping for in the next generatoin of systems admins....
[copter]$ units 1billion/200million
(ain't unix fun?)Now that you mention...
I think that it was kinda like the apple/MS thing: The inferior system was used by many people because it was cheaper. Then, after years, it got to the point where so many people were using the inferior system (and managed to tweak it into doing so many interesting things) that the herd mentality took over -- people started to think that if so many people are using it, it must be the best. After that, they started to forget about the other (possibly inherently better) system.
Now with OS software, the same thing is happening (possibly) again -- but windows is losing market because it is not only more proprietary: It's also inferior
I don't think that they're all going to be running Microsoft, though. MS is too expensive -- both in terms of licensing costs and hardware requirements. To get 1 billion people online, you're going to have at least half of them with low enough income that the costs of a Microsoft license and the hardware needed to run it is going to be prohibitive.
Even if the direct costs weren't prohibitive, 5-1 support ratios (if that's even close to accurate for Windows) probably would be.
It wasn't entirely a joke. I remember seeing the comment being used in the early days of usenet (about the time of the 'great split' from .net to .sci/soc/alt/etc).
It was a conversation about sending data physically as opposed to electronically. The comment about "Never underestimate the bandwidth of a station wagon full of mag'tapes" came up, and the conversation then diverted into the distinction of bandwidth vs latency.
(I just wish I could remember the proper domain name for Deja-vue, now).
The "don't sue us" clause may just be a standard 'cover my ass' thing, or it may be that they believe that you could get alot more from them if you did sue. You may want to talk to a lawyer, but I'd say that there's not much reason to not sign if/when you have absolutely no intention to sue them.
Remember: The severence package is an offer. It's a negotiating tactic. You can accept it as is, or you can negotiate something a bit better or you can even hire a lawyer and go the legal route.
I don't know what the other terms of the contract are, but if they're asking you to go above and beyond the call of duty as an EX employee (notice the emphasis on EX-), then you're completely within your rights to ask them to pay you for the favour -- or refuse it outright. Payment for the favour should be in addition to what they owe you, generally, in severance.
The $15K is for dropping a car from the cargo plane they already have access to. A Greyhound would (as the article mentioned) require a C5. I have no idea what it would cost to rent a C5, and I don't have the money to find out.
That's what I get for posting before I read the article.
I'm sure that any of the big 3 auto manufacturers would jump (excuse the pun) at the chance to put a paratrooping SUV into their adds. $15K/jump would be a pitttance to them. You might even have to raise your price just to get their attention.
OK: I guess you could call me green, but it doesn't show up in pictures.
The last time I told someone that a bunch of little green (and other colored people helped me put something together, it took me 3 weeks to get out of observation.
Another reason for the breakdown is the hypnotizing effect of reputation. When the names of eminent people and places appear on the top of submitted papers, says Florida physicist Hebard, "reviewers react almost unconsciously" to their prestige. "People discount reports from groups that aren't well known,"
One thing that could be done to cut down on prejudice within at least this part of the review process would be to remove names and other identifying information (like institution) from papers before they get sent out for review. This would allow work to be judged a bit more on it's merits and a bit less on it's authors.
Such a change migh both slow down frauds like Schon's and also allow new ideas more easily into the public realm. Papers don't just get erroneously passed based on name. Sometimes otherwise good papers can be rejected based on the fact that the author is either unkown or out of favour. Anonymous peer review would help mute both of those effects.
I.E. You won't be able to sneeze without a digital signature on your handkerchief -- and if you don't use a handkerchief, they'll just plug your nose.
If they're either denied a patent altogether or locked down to a patent so narrow that other (reasonable?) solutions would be doable, I'm betting that they won't go in that direction. An unpatented DRM system would simply drive people away from MS-Windows in droves. This is something that MS might know better than to do. If they don't know better, then it would at least be a bonus for vendors of other operating systems (including Open Software solutions).
Far easier to convince the PTO to not issue a patent than to defend ourselves against a claim of patent infringement 5 years down the road. If Microsoft gets a pre-emptive lock on crytpographically secure systems, they'll forever (ok, for the next few decades) prevent OS programmers from doing the same thing.
Even just forcing them to tighten their patent application would give us more breathing room in the future.
Stalinism != Communism
Canada used to have a pretty strong Marxist/Leninist communist movement -- they used to heap scorn on Stain.
The biggest difference between Stalinist communism and end-game Capitalism is how obvious it is who controls the monopoly. With exponential corporate mergers we're getting pretty close to the centrally planned economy model with only the thinest veneer of free market covering it.
Another way of putting it: Under Stalinism, the government controls the businesses. Under present-day Captitalism, it's the other way 'round.
Know that if you do this, you will probably never get another penny from your work this weekend -- no matter how many reprints I actually want and no matter what I want to do with them.
( The people who want to go this path are usually the people who would normally be ordering a huge number of prints... i.e. the big spenders).
It works socially: Everybody wants a good wedding photographer, but not everybody has the money. In the old business model, the people who want (and can afford) 7 copies of every picture and a 36"x54" blowup effectively subsidize the peole who can only afford a couple of 5x7s and one 8x10 formal.
For a photographer who does the photos for the cheap/broke couple, there is some hope that the happy couple will be able to afford a few more copies some years down the road.
If you pay me to take a picture, this is not the case. If you take my pictures and generate reprints etc. I will generally get zero benefit from this -- other than (perhaps) a referral, if you are religious about including contact information with all copies of my pictures.
As such, paying for rights to a photo are like paying a programmer on contract to do a program and then give you the rights to that program closed source ({,s}he will never see any future benefit from it). What would you charge me to do that with your source code?
We run into a marketing problem here, too. People often want a wedding photographer for cheap... A wedding photographer often has to bid low, and then makes their real profit off of reprints, etc. If you want their work 'open source' then it's appropriate to pay for the copyright on the pictures (i.e. something akin to what would be charged for a reasonable number of reprints with current marketing methods).
You can't have it both ways. Either pay for a cheap photographer and then prices for reprints, or pay for the full package, including unlimited reprints. If I tried to hire a high-quality programmer for $15/hour for a short contract and then expected to own copyright on the result, I'd be laughed out of most contracters' offices -- and I'd be worried about the quality of the work of anybody who accepted my proposition.
Tonight, 20 years later, I finally figured it out.
It did for me. My dad died when I was young, so it was just me, my mom and my three sisters. I got blamed whenever anything went wrong (I was often the only one who could fix it.. SOmetimes I confused blame with a simple request to fix, and didn't bother to say anything).
In any case, I went to a boarding school for grades 7 thru 10. Sometime around grade 9, one sister remarked to me.
The only thing that surprised me about that was the fact that it took them almost 3 years to figure it out.
At least it wasn't programmed by Al Quaida.
(on the other hand, it looks like the fragetics server has been crushed by /.)