It will be interesting. Sometime in the next couple of decades mankind will have a heart rending true life legal battle about pulling the plug on an artificial life form that shows signs of intelligence.
Even more interesting, with in days of mankind trying AI, I suspect AI will have a similar trial where AI is the judge, jury and executioner for mankind.
Working in the Dotcom field, I think it is good that organizations like UC can protect their names. If you look around, you will find that there are thousands of companies creating hundreds of thousands of little doorway pages to web sites.
Just like email spam, this search engine spam is making money. Trademark law is giving legitimate companies a tool to fight SEO spammers. As with most legal issues. It is better just to handle the whole issue as a trademark issue, rather than on a piece by piece judging of the merits of the site.
Although there is a group of people who are geeky and feel wronged by the system. This is just standard domain name issue stuff. I would take as a lesson to learn by and not as a great censorship effort.
As pointed out, all this group needs to do is register a new domain. I suspect they would find the school would allow them to URL forward the old domain name to the new domain name.
As for SEO spam. Have you ever noticed that you often get a large number of garbage ad sites when you do web searches. It is people playing this search engine spam game.
This seems to be especially true in marketing. So far, in the companies I've worked with, the marketers lined themselves up by height with the tallest being the most powerful.
Of course, this is different from electoral politics where elections are often decided alphabetically.
Programmers like other professionals need to establish a sense of professional elitism. PHP is a language that just about anyone can use, and when you have something that just about anyone can do, then you won't get the big bucks.
Programmers, doctors, lawyers need to fortify their salaries with an impenetrable layer of jargon. Java has the jargon.
The end result, PHP/MySQL is what people use when they want to get a job done, Java/XML is what you use if you want to build a career.
Journals are not cheap, and paying through the nose just for the priviledge of reading what should be public information is rather galling.
The counter argument is: collecting information, writing and publishing high quality work is extremely hard and expensive. The should be in the quote is an opinion. The counter argument is that research is expensive; so we need a market approach to help determine how the money goes to research to help determine which research projects gets funded. Expensive journals is a way of raising needed funds.
The internet is an interesting challenge because everything is linked together. Yahoo is now a terrorist organization because they mention the names of web sites deemed terrorists (I noticed that they did not have actual links in an anchor tags, but it does list an executable URL.).
Slashdot intentionally linked to a news acticle at Yahoo...making/. a terrorist organization. I appear to have just responded to the/. article making me a terrorist.
What a way to ruin a Saturday. I think I will go and fill up my tank with gas...something I am sure won't ever put money in terrorists hands, because this whole free speech thang doesn't work.
You are correct that standards are a better solution than government regulations.
OTOH, they should have a squadron of attack lawyers to use against anyone who uses their StandardsMark without their approval
However, there also needs to a recourse against monopolistic efforts that try to use standards and pseudo standards to leverage their position in the market, or when companies go way outside accepted behave like many of the parasite companies do with drive by installs of products and redirected links.
The industry should put up technical solutions first, but a legal dialog needs to be on the outskirts of the evolution of the technology.
Being unemployed means I have time to catch up on the news. Instead of all the articles about cool tech advances that I missed while working 12 hour days, everyone is hitting us with this depressing economic reality garbage.
For the most part outsourcing is a smart move for US tech firms. The International tech market is where the action is. So it is best for U.S. firms to be securing toe holds in the International market.
It is politically unpopular, but the big wage disparity between countries means US workers will probably have to accept pay cuts to stay competitive. Tant pis.
The only really boner move made in the last several years was that stupid HB??? bill that brought in then laid off a hundred thousand tech workers. I suspect that any regulation the government tries to pass will simply have chilling affects on U.S. companies to maintain an advantage, and won't really help the US workers.
Amazon.com excluded, this merger will give one company control of about half the affiliate marketing industry. (affiliate marketing is a segment of the ad industry.)
It may not be dying, but there seems to be a good number of powerful entrenched interests working to kill it.
Threats I see are things like the parasite and adware companies that are trying to install software on machines to either control or influence purchases.
Ad blocking and porn blocking software also poses a threat. The deal here is that the ad blockers have the choice of which ads to block. Already you are seeing situations where an advertiser reaches "terms" with an ad blocking company to let their ads through.
The number of paid listings on search engines in relation to free listings is growing.
When things like parasiteware and adblockers move from the desktop (where the user has some control) to routers where businesses control access, things get very scary.
Big media doesn't like all of these blogs stealing their thunder. Academic circles are incensed at all the commercial sites popping up everywhere and want to create little circles of their own.
Personally, I think most of the interests balance each other, but technologies like parasites and net partitioning need to be monitored closely and are likely to require regulation.
The honorable Senator Orrin Hatch should be interested in the project as it might help realize his dreams of exploding computers. You could use the explosives to save the disk when it is accelerated, or to blow up the computer when a copyright holder presses the self destruct.
BTW, if they really are like airbags, the devices can only be used once. However, what realy matters with analogies in business press releases is to make investors think of other market successes, and not really about the product.
The small, independent, one and two man ecommerce sites are the ones that will be hit the hardest with a new tax system. They really won't have the resources to figure out the tax system. It will pretty much wipe out those silly little independently coded ecommerce web sites that you see here and there.
This is a loss for Linux, as it is easy to talk these small sites into using unsupported ecommerce software running on Linux. Gearing up for a big nex tax will require a type of support the free software business will not be able to deliver.
It is also interesting to see that the government is talking about big increases in taxes at this point of the business cycle.
Greenspan has been pursuing massively inflationary monetary policy for awhile, there's been a gradual devaluation of the dollar. Just about every part of the market is really geared for a big spurt of inflation...except, of course, wages.
Workers and small businesses should be prepared for some very serious belt tightening in the years to come.
When you hire a lead programmer from a competitor you have thought that you hurt the competitor (Sun Tzu approves). Also the chance that you will benefit from the contacts in the employee's.
Who do you hurt when you hire the unemployed? No-one (Sun Tzu frowns). Obviously unemployed drone has no contacts either.
Best Seller lists are generally about the list, and not about the quality of the work. Good books fare well on the lists.
The whole point of a best seller list is that people like to read what other people are reading (regardless of quality). Merchants like the lists since it helps them determine where to invest limited resources. The list feeds on itself.
If a truly good book is marketed well, it will have the same pattern on the best seller list as a Grisham. If not, they often have a pattern where the appear toward the bottom of the lists several months or years after release and stay there for a long time.
The best seller marketing strategy is about timing a release and hitting the market with a big media blitz. Once on the list, the list itself creates the sales. Get on a best selling list and you appear in airports where you make the big sales.
As for the reason that there tends to be more "quick reads" on the best seller lists than slow reads. It turns out that people can read more quick reads than long serious works. I can read four Grishams in the time it takes to work through a Gabriel Garcia Marquez.
The speed reading market determines what the rest of us read. Speed readers hate poetic books with lots of twists and turns in the languages because it breaks their speed reading. A speed reader might read five books in the time it takes me to read one...so they have a bigger impact on the market.
Anyway, the publishing industry will read analyze a book. They will determine if it has a good shot at being a best seller (ie, easy for speed readers and somewhat interesting). If they think it does, they invest in the media blitz.
I suspect music is somewhat the same way. You determine if there is something unique enough about the band and song. If it there is, you invest in the first month's media blitz to get that position on the list.
I agree that marketing has its place. The problem happens when the marketing machine does more to feed itself than to feed the artist. I think the big media music is in this state.
The American Idol winner is simply a cog in the machine.
My experience is that alternative marketing mechanisms, like web sites, have done a great deal to increase the amount that artists get paid. P2P has not helped independent artists. I'm seeing bands getting audiences and developing followings like never before. The local music scene is fun, bands are linking to venues, venues back to bands. Fans link to both. The end result is that they are creating a new and bigger audience. IMHO, This is where the real music scene is happening, and it is generating cash for bands and venues. My guess is that a higher percent of cash goes to musicians than through Sony.
I think the trick is for end users to take control of the market. Users essentially vote for the music they like by putting links to bands in their blog.
The creative commons license helps this idea since it gives people a certain amount of material that they can use to cast their votes for the best bands.
If you look around there are thousands of local bands tossing up web sites...they now need traffic. This model gives the artists control, but so far there is not enough taking advantage of this offering to make a big impact in the market.
Our biggest problem is that we, as a society, have confused well marketed with "good." There's thousands of great musicians running around that are not well known.
What main stream America wants is the marketed music. Well, guess what? marketing machines are about making money.
Imagine who cool it would be if all the effort thrown into pirating the marketed stuff went into creating an underground force for marketing independent music?
The cool thing about the creative commons license is that it is a start in making such an underground force.
I agree that caps are a bad idea. The industry should be smart, and simply charge more for higher bandwidth. The industry is hurt with the one price fits all model.
P2P and home based web sites are a big problem for ISPs because the users are doing something different than the pricing model was designed for.
The point of my post was that if you run P2P on a company that is priced for straight web use, then the P2P network is externalizing its cost onto the sytem. The preferred solution is to charge the high bandwidth user more.
The promise was delivering streaming services from the ISP at reasonable prices
You've got me there. If you ever had an ISP promising that, then they have not delivered. Content served locally by the ISP would be a tremendous service. Since the ISP bills for service, then they would be able to add on fees for the content.
I would prefer to see a such a mechanism. It throws in a needed third party into the puzzle. These big subscription services run by media conglomerates have the disadvantage that they only pay for the artists they own...there is no room for independent third parties. Locally owned distribution mechanism would have an incentive to deliver local talent...creating a market for local bands.
Personally, I see both the community sharing copyrighted work and big media as the problems. The mechanism for paying for content needs to evolve along with the technology. The little dance we have with KaZaA, the RIAA and big media have really cut out the ability of independent third parties to come in and make a workable system.
The media companies never delivered on this promise
The media companies have delivered this. You can download music from a number of services including MP3.com (free), eMusic.com, listen.com, etc.. You can download movies from MovieLink.
The thing the media companies haven't delivered, and probably will never deliver, is free music or free full feature movies with no commercials. The media companies never promised that we would stop paying artisans for creating things.
Here are three free songs from a musician I know. You have to pay to get the full CD (ha, ha) it's an ad. It's a teenager trying to get cash by writing songs and playing a guitar.
I also do not ever recall any ISP saying that the subscription fee that you pay for bandwidth pays for the content.
The media companies never delivered on this promise
I don't ever remember being sold on anything other than 4 or 5 times faster than the modem. I guess I am not naive enough to think that 256K is fast enough to deliver high quality video. It delivers music well...not video. It takes several hours to download a movie from MovieLink.
P2P is not about the music industry failing to provide. It is about people wanting music for free. P2P is not more efficient.
P2P is probably the least efficient way to deliver music. KaZaA creates incredible amounts of white noise as P2P servers ping each other. The economies of P2P are all about externalizing costs...not efficiency. It is about driving an extra mile to avoid paying for a product. Rather than an investor having to pay for a $100,000 box to delivering music and having to pay royalties to musicians, you have a 10,000 $1,000 boxes sitting around buring up electricity downloading pirated music.
A highpowered server in a server farm with large bandwidth pipes is substantially more efficient than several thousand P2P servers hooked to DSL. It is just that P2P externalizes all of its costs. Rather than paying for the creation of a product, the P2P community is willing to bear a much higher expense to get the stuff for free.
As for the ISP, P2P externalizes its expenses to the community. A P2P is both a publisher and an end user. Essentially, the person using P2P is trying to get the service of both a web host and an isp in the same subscription fee.
KaZaA and toxic waste disposal are all about trying to externalize costs.
Phones only spread infections when people share the phones. So a pay phone or other public phone would do more to spread infection than a cell phone.
The fact that we are all running around with our private little phones means that we are exposing ourselves to fewer phone carried bugs than we would get by using a common phone.
I really can't remember the last time I handed my phone to a stranger. In fact, its been several month since anyone other than myself has touched my cell phone.
As for companies that have use a common phone for people on call...they really should just get forwardable 800 number...that way they could swith duties by pointing to different phones...it is much more convenient.
I am actually a very fiendish person at heart. Rather than just wipe disks. I would fill the drives full of absolutely bogus information with fake account numbers, names, addresses, etc.. I would spend happy nights wondering how long it takes a hacker tracing transactions from Sauron, Smeagle, Bilbo and Frodo to figure out they were duped.
As for PC security, the problems of disposing hard disks is a good reason to store things in an compressed, encrypted format where the encryption keys are not on the same disk as the information.
Adding an extra hundred dollars on to the price of hiring employees will increase the disincentive for hiring employees. The US Tax and Workers' Comp systems are renown for heaping disincentives on hiring. By heaping all sorts of costs onto hiring people, the US economy does a great job of making the process of hiring people painful. I am surprised that companies still do it.
The pricing model will be great for companies with extremely heavy information needs. It will be lousy for companies that hire a large number of non-IT workers such as construction, transportation, food...
I've always disliked these sales that were dependent on factors not really that related to the item being sold. But it will be interesting to see how the product fairs.
The site didn't mention international pricing. A hundred dollars a seat will be a tough sell in countries with a low earnings per capita.
I always hate these pricing models that are based on something different than what is being sold because they tend to create an inequity
Slashdot Mirror
It will be interesting. Sometime in the next couple of decades mankind will have a heart rending true life legal battle about pulling the plug on an artificial life form that shows signs of intelligence.
Even more interesting, with in days of mankind trying AI, I suspect AI will have a similar trial where AI is the judge, jury and executioner for mankind.
Working in the Dotcom field, I think it is good that organizations like UC can protect their names. If you look around, you will find that there are thousands of companies creating hundreds of thousands of little doorway pages to web sites.
Just like email spam, this search engine spam is making money. Trademark law is giving legitimate companies a tool to fight SEO spammers. As with most legal issues. It is better just to handle the whole issue as a trademark issue, rather than on a piece by piece judging of the merits of the site.
Although there is a group of people who are geeky and feel wronged by the system. This is just standard domain name issue stuff. I would take as a lesson to learn by and not as a great censorship effort.
As pointed out, all this group needs to do is register a new domain. I suspect they would find the school would allow them to URL forward the old domain name to the new domain name.
As for SEO spam. Have you ever noticed that you often get a large number of garbage ad sites when you do web searches. It is people playing this search engine spam game.
This seems to be especially true in marketing. So far, in the companies I've worked with, the marketers lined themselves up by height with the tallest being the most powerful.
Of course, this is different from electoral politics where elections are often decided alphabetically.
Programmers like other professionals need to establish a sense of professional elitism. PHP is a language that just about anyone can use, and when you have something that just about anyone can do, then you won't get the big bucks.
Programmers, doctors, lawyers need to fortify their salaries with an impenetrable layer of jargon. Java has the jargon.
The end result, PHP/MySQL is what people use when they want to get a job done, Java/XML is what you use if you want to build a career.
The counter argument is: collecting information, writing and publishing high quality work is extremely hard and expensive. The should be in the quote is an opinion. The counter argument is that research is expensive; so we need a market approach to help determine how the money goes to research to help determine which research projects gets funded. Expensive journals is a way of raising needed funds.
The internet is an interesting challenge because everything is linked together. Yahoo is now a terrorist organization because they mention the names of web sites deemed terrorists (I noticed that they did not have actual links in an anchor tags, but it does list an executable URL.).
/. a terrorist organization. I appear to have just responded to the /. article making me a terrorist.
Slashdot intentionally linked to a news acticle at Yahoo...making
What a way to ruin a Saturday. I think I will go and fill up my tank with gas...something I am sure won't ever put money in terrorists hands, because this whole free speech thang doesn't work.
You are correct that standards are a better solution than government regulations.
However, there also needs to a recourse against monopolistic efforts that try to use standards and pseudo standards to leverage their position in the market, or when companies go way outside accepted behave like many of the parasite companies do with drive by installs of products and redirected links.
The industry should put up technical solutions first, but a legal dialog needs to be on the outskirts of the evolution of the technology.
Being unemployed means I have time to catch up on the news. Instead of all the articles about cool tech advances that I missed while working 12 hour days, everyone is hitting us with this depressing economic reality garbage.
For the most part outsourcing is a smart move for US tech firms. The International tech market is where the action is. So it is best for U.S. firms to be securing toe holds in the International market.
It is politically unpopular, but the big wage disparity between countries means US workers will probably have to accept pay cuts to stay competitive. Tant pis.
The only really boner move made in the last several years was that stupid HB??? bill that brought in then laid off a hundred thousand tech workers. I suspect that any regulation the government tries to pass will simply have chilling affects on U.S. companies to maintain an advantage, and won't really help the US workers.
Perhaps the industry consolidation that is starting to accelerate is a cause for concern. For example, this was just announced:
(Value Click buys Commission Junction.)
Amazon.com excluded, this merger will give one company control of about half the affiliate marketing industry. (affiliate marketing is a segment of the ad industry.)
It may not be dying, but there seems to be a good number of powerful entrenched interests working to kill it.
Threats I see are things like the parasite and adware companies that are trying to install software on machines to either control or influence purchases.
Ad blocking and porn blocking software also poses a threat. The deal here is that the ad blockers have the choice of which ads to block. Already you are seeing situations where an advertiser reaches "terms" with an ad blocking company to let their ads through.
The number of paid listings on search engines in relation to free listings is growing.
When things like parasiteware and adblockers move from the desktop (where the user has some control) to routers where businesses control access, things get very scary.
Big media doesn't like all of these blogs stealing their thunder. Academic circles are incensed at all the commercial sites popping up everywhere and want to create little circles of their own.
Personally, I think most of the interests balance each other, but technologies like parasites and net partitioning need to be monitored closely and are likely to require regulation.
Air bags have explosives in them!
The honorable Senator Orrin Hatch should be interested in the project as it might help realize his dreams of exploding computers. You could use the explosives to save the disk when it is accelerated, or to blow up the computer when a copyright holder presses the self destruct.
BTW, if they really are like airbags, the devices can only be used once. However, what realy matters with analogies in business press releases is to make investors think of other market successes, and not really about the product.
The small, independent, one and two man ecommerce sites are the ones that will be hit the hardest with a new tax system. They really won't have the resources to figure out the tax system. It will pretty much wipe out those silly little independently coded ecommerce web sites that you see here and there.
This is a loss for Linux, as it is easy to talk these small sites into using unsupported ecommerce software running on Linux. Gearing up for a big nex tax will require a type of support the free software business will not be able to deliver.
It is also interesting to see that the government is talking about big increases in taxes at this point of the business cycle.
Greenspan has been pursuing massively inflationary monetary policy for awhile, there's been a gradual devaluation of the dollar. Just about every part of the market is really geared for a big spurt of inflation...except, of course, wages.
Workers and small businesses should be prepared for some very serious belt tightening in the years to come.
When you hire a lead programmer from a competitor you have thought that you hurt the competitor (Sun Tzu approves). Also the chance that you will benefit from the contacts in the employee's.
Who do you hurt when you hire the unemployed? No-one (Sun Tzu frowns). Obviously unemployed drone has no contacts either.
No, the people who are unemployed and read slashdot all day long are just plain envious of the people who are employed and read slashdot all day long.
Best Seller lists are generally about the list, and not about the quality of the work. Good books fare well on the lists.
The whole point of a best seller list is that people like to read what other people are reading (regardless of quality). Merchants like the lists since it helps them determine where to invest limited resources. The list feeds on itself.
If a truly good book is marketed well, it will have the same pattern on the best seller list as a Grisham. If not, they often have a pattern where the appear toward the bottom of the lists several months or years after release and stay there for a long time.
The best seller marketing strategy is about timing a release and hitting the market with a big media blitz. Once on the list, the list itself creates the sales. Get on a best selling list and you appear in airports where you make the big sales.
As for the reason that there tends to be more "quick reads" on the best seller lists than slow reads. It turns out that people can read more quick reads than long serious works. I can read four Grishams in the time it takes to work through a Gabriel Garcia Marquez.
The speed reading market determines what the rest of us read. Speed readers hate poetic books with lots of twists and turns in the languages because it breaks their speed reading. A speed reader might read five books in the time it takes me to read one...so they have a bigger impact on the market.
Anyway, the publishing industry will read analyze a book. They will determine if it has a good shot at being a best seller (ie, easy for speed readers and somewhat interesting). If they think it does, they invest in the media blitz.
I suspect music is somewhat the same way. You determine if there is something unique enough about the band and song. If it there is, you invest in the first month's media blitz to get that position on the list.
I agree that marketing has its place. The problem happens when the marketing machine does more to feed itself than to feed the artist. I think the big media music is in this state.
The American Idol winner is simply a cog in the machine.
My experience is that alternative marketing mechanisms, like web sites, have done a great deal to increase the amount that artists get paid. P2P has not helped independent artists. I'm seeing bands getting audiences and developing followings like never before. The local music scene is fun, bands are linking to venues, venues back to bands. Fans link to both. The end result is that they are creating a new and bigger audience. IMHO, This is where the real music scene is happening, and it is generating cash for bands and venues. My guess is that a higher percent of cash goes to musicians than through Sony.
I think the trick is for end users to take control of the market. Users essentially vote for the music they like by putting links to bands in their blog.
The creative commons license helps this idea since it gives people a certain amount of material that they can use to cast their votes for the best bands.
If you look around there are thousands of local bands tossing up web sites...they now need traffic. This model gives the artists control, but so far there is not enough taking advantage of this offering to make a big impact in the market.
Our biggest problem is that we, as a society, have confused well marketed with "good." There's thousands of great musicians running around that are not well known.
What main stream America wants is the marketed music. Well, guess what? marketing machines are about making money.
Imagine who cool it would be if all the effort thrown into pirating the marketed stuff went into creating an underground force for marketing independent music?
The cool thing about the creative commons license is that it is a start in making such an underground force.
I agree that caps are a bad idea. The industry should be smart, and simply charge more for higher bandwidth. The industry is hurt with the one price fits all model.
P2P and home based web sites are a big problem for ISPs because the users are doing something different than the pricing model was designed for.
The point of my post was that if you run P2P on a company that is priced for straight web use, then the P2P network is externalizing its cost onto the sytem. The preferred solution is to charge the high bandwidth user more.
I would prefer to see a such a mechanism. It throws in a needed third party into the puzzle. These big subscription services run by media conglomerates have the disadvantage that they only pay for the artists they own...there is no room for independent third parties. Locally owned distribution mechanism would have an incentive to deliver local talent...creating a market for local bands.
Personally, I see both the community sharing copyrighted work and big media as the problems. The mechanism for paying for content needs to evolve along with the technology. The little dance we have with KaZaA, the RIAA and big media have really cut out the ability of independent third parties to come in and make a workable system.
The media companies have delivered this. You can download music from a number of services including MP3.com (free), eMusic.com, listen.com, etc.. You can download movies from MovieLink.
The thing the media companies haven't delivered, and probably will never deliver, is free music or free full feature movies with no commercials. The media companies never promised that we would stop paying artisans for creating things.
Here are three free songs from a musician I know. You have to pay to get the full CD (ha, ha) it's an ad. It's a teenager trying to get cash by writing songs and playing a guitar.
I also do not ever recall any ISP saying that the subscription fee that you pay for bandwidth pays for the content.
I don't ever remember being sold on anything other than 4 or 5 times faster than the modem. I guess I am not naive enough to think that 256K is fast enough to deliver high quality video. It delivers music well...not video. It takes several hours to download a movie from MovieLink.
P2P is not about the music industry failing to provide. It is about people wanting music for free. P2P is not more efficient.
P2P is probably the least efficient way to deliver music. KaZaA creates incredible amounts of white noise as P2P servers ping each other. The economies of P2P are all about externalizing costs...not efficiency. It is about driving an extra mile to avoid paying for a product. Rather than an investor having to pay for a $100,000 box to delivering music and having to pay royalties to musicians, you have a 10,000 $1,000 boxes sitting around buring up electricity downloading pirated music.
A highpowered server in a server farm with large bandwidth pipes is substantially more efficient than several thousand P2P servers hooked to DSL. It is just that P2P externalizes all of its costs. Rather than paying for the creation of a product, the P2P community is willing to bear a much higher expense to get the stuff for free.
As for the ISP, P2P externalizes its expenses to the community. A P2P is both a publisher and an end user. Essentially, the person using P2P is trying to get the service of both a web host and an isp in the same subscription fee.
KaZaA and toxic waste disposal are all about trying to externalize costs.
Phones only spread infections when people share the phones. So a pay phone or other public phone would do more to spread infection than a cell phone.
The fact that we are all running around with our private little phones means that we are exposing ourselves to fewer phone carried bugs than we would get by using a common phone.
I really can't remember the last time I handed my phone to a stranger. In fact, its been several month since anyone other than myself has touched my cell phone.
As for companies that have use a common phone for people on call...they really should just get forwardable 800 number...that way they could swith duties by pointing to different phones...it is much more convenient.
I am actually a very fiendish person at heart. Rather than just wipe disks. I would fill the drives full of absolutely bogus information with fake account numbers, names, addresses, etc.. I would spend happy nights wondering how long it takes a hacker tracing transactions from Sauron, Smeagle, Bilbo and Frodo to figure out they were duped.
As for PC security, the problems of disposing hard disks is a good reason to store things in an compressed, encrypted format where the encryption keys are not on the same disk as the information.
Adding an extra hundred dollars on to the price of hiring employees will increase the disincentive for hiring employees. The US Tax and Workers' Comp systems are renown for heaping disincentives on hiring. By heaping all sorts of costs onto hiring people, the US economy does a great job of making the process of hiring people painful. I am surprised that companies still do it.
The pricing model will be great for companies with extremely heavy information needs. It will be lousy for companies that hire a large number of non-IT workers such as construction, transportation, food...
I've always disliked these sales that were dependent on factors not really that related to the item being sold. But it will be interesting to see how the product fairs.
The site didn't mention international pricing. A hundred dollars a seat will be a tough sell in countries with a low earnings per capita. I always hate these pricing models that are based on something different than what is being sold because they tend to create an inequity