Keep in mind, the credit card companies, merchant account companies, and merchant account banks are all completely different entities. I wrote up a summary (leaving out a few details) of how this works here: http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=125307&cid=105 04929
" Yes, I recognize that the bulk charge would be considerably lower than the individual charge of $.20. However, the credit card companies will realize the same thing and will adjust their rates. the 1.59% rate is based around the fact that the credit card company knows it will be getting an additional $.20."
The companies know about bulk pricing, it isn't a secret. In fact, they created the bulk pricing system as an alternative for certain types of retailers. They aren't going to "realize" anything and adjust their rates. People have been bulk charging for the last 15 years (perhaps even more).
As well, this is not a product being offered, so your notions of mark-up don't apply in the same way as they would apply to a book. The companies actually pay next-to-nothing per credit card transaction. That's why they charge as a percentage of your sale. Let's say you do a $5 sale and your rate is 3%, you pay $0.15 for that transaction. Now, let's say you do a $500 sale and your rate is 1.5%, you pay $7.50 for that transaction. The banks, CC companies, and merchant companies don't care how much the transaction is - it's all the same work for them. The amount of money to be handled is just a variable passed along with the CC info. The fact that they charge one person $0.15 for a service and another person $7.50 for the same exact service should be proof enough that their cost of doing business is practically nothing. Even if all you did were $1 transactions, you could still get a rate of 4% or 5% with no transaction fee. That's $0.04 or $0.05 per transaction, and everyone is still making a profit - the merchant account provider, the merchant account bank, the CC company, the middle man, everyone.
All they have to pay for is some bandwidth each month (CC info is extremely small, no more than 100 bytes required to store all the info), a tech support and management crew (largest cost here: say 100 people @ $100k/year = $10mil/year... $833k/month which is nothing for them), and some hardware and property costs (rent, power, etc). Their business is almost a pure profit business. Where they lose money is in other financial endeavors... making loans to people who default, bad investments, etc.
My brother (also a fairly technical person) bought me a copy of Windows ME for my birthday one time (before he realized it was a piece of crap). I already knew ME was a piece of crap... needless to say, I never even removed the shrink-wraping from the box. I meant to return it, but it has been a while now; perhaps I could sell it on eBay...
I don't really watch TV anymore. But even so, I still subscribe to basic cable. Here's why: Comcast charges $57/month for internet if you don't already have their cable TV. But, if you buy their basic cable TV package (60 channels or so) for $10/month, they'll reduce their charge for internet from $57/month to $42/month (total of $52/month for cable TV and internet). So even though I don't watch the cable TV, I still pay for it because it's $5 cheaper per month to get TV and internet than it is for internet only. If that's not a sure sign of a monopoly, I don't know what is.
Well, if I could find the forum where I posted my numbers, I would show them to you, but I can't. Perhaps this sounds convenient for my argument, and maybe it is, but that's the fact. I was extremely liberal with my numbers and padded most of them an extra 100%, most technical people in the forum also agreed with my numbers based on their experience as IT managers, system operators, etc.
Those CCAvenue people are out of their mind for retail business, perhaps they are customized for some specialty sector. If not, I'm surprised that they are even in business.
Your 2.88% number doesn't take into account bulk charging as I mentioned above. Basically, you collect all of your charges for the day and actually charge them all together at the end of the day as a bulk charge. You still check that funds are available at the point of sale, but you don't complete the transaction until you've collected all the charges for the day. (Many gas stations do this when you pre-pay at the pump, and that's why you'll notice a hold on your card for mybe $100 for 2 weeks after the fill-up even though it only cost $25.39 or whatever.) Then, you can use a bulk charge rate instead of the $0.20 rate and the effective charge-per-transaction is much less... closer to $0.02 or $0.03 per transaction. Which would make the rate 1.79% for $0.03 on $15.
And if someone is offering an UP-FRONT rate to just ANYONE of 1.59%, what makes you think they won't cut that in half for someone willing to do millions of dollars in business with them? Sorry, but you're being a bit naive here. My total base rate runs around 2.5% and I am an ant compared to Sony or Blizzard, etc. Common sense begs you to believe that the price any of them pay is AT LEAST less than half of what I pay.
That, or people already know where all the pr0n is located and don't need to search for it. In this day and age with all of the "Thumb Collection" websites (for both images and video), why not just go directly to the sites?
Of course, I wouldn't know first hand, I'm just relaying information that I've heard from "people I know".
Well, now you're forcing your beliefs on me. Why should I be forced by the government to help other countries and other people out because you want to? Where's my freedom to make a decision about my own money? You are effectively forcing me to follow one of your beliefs. That's not the freedom this country was based on.
Actually, I was basing my statements on the fact that I am a retailer on the side, and I know how charging CCs work and how small business economics work. A base of 4% to 5% is ridiculous for anyone, even the smallest of companies just starting out. Just look around online for merchant accounts and you can see what the real costs are. The writers of that book are just plain lying to you.
And, I would hope that any company like Sony, Blizzard, etc, would be able to leverage their buying power to negotiate a much lower rate. In fact, my particular business would probably get the worst rate of any type of business based on the types of charging I am doing. My average charge is around $10 and my average monthly volume is less than $3000 a month. And, I only charge from online purchases (another factor that raises the rate, versus charging in a physical retail location). Even then, my total base rate is still only around 2.5% of the charge. Sony, etc could do bulk charging where they charge 100 people at a time, and their average charge would jump up to $1000. And they would probably do at least $150000 in sales a month (10,000 users). With those numbers, and the rest of Sony's, Blizzard's, etc buying power, I would be suprised if they couldn't negotiate a rate under 1%.
Look at the numbers yourself, research merchant accounts, you can see they're just straight out lying to you.
Yeh, I'll laugh when you die of a heart attack before retirement from chronic sleep deprivation. Sorry if I believe in good health, but I can feel smug over here knowing that it sucks to be you.
And as far as the money is concerned, I earn more than the yearly cost of the game in 1 day (which isn't exactly on the rich-and-famous level, but enough to be comfy). But that $280 is better spent on an investment, or perhaps 6 different fun games in a year, not just 1.
"Huh. Interesting, since Mulligan and Patrovsky estimate that most companies would lose half of your estimate simply on the credit card transfaction fees, credit card charge failures, expired cards, fraud, and free month. (Their estimate is 10% of what is being charged never reaches the company.)"
lmao. If that really were true, it would apply to any company, right? There's nothing unique to someone developing MMORPGs when it comes to charging credit cards. So 1/2 of that number would be $1.50, 10% of the $15 they get. If your average small retail business lost 10% of their monthly revenue right off the bat, they would go under in a year. But that doesn't happen does it? No. In fact, over 80% of new businesses stay open for at least 2 years (check the US Census data). The estimates used by Mulligan and Patrovsky and probably including menial expenses used in other areas of the company. That, or they're inflating their numbers due to gaming studio woes (they're not exactly what we would call an "unbiased" source).
Yeah, I'm sure they're not taking your $15/month, pocketing $10 of it, and then pumping the remaining $5 into development of a new expansion for you to buy.
My point is: fine, it takes money to keep the servers up, to provide the bandwidth, make minor performance improvements, etc. But it doesn't take $15/month. I did an extensive cost analysis back before SWG came out because I thought the MMORPG costs were ridiculous (and I might have even posted it to/. - I'm not which forum I did it in) and I was able to determine that $3 per month was a very liberal estimate (in the developer's favor) for the costs of keeping up an MMORPG system.
Double that number to allow for profits, and you've got $6/month... $72/year... much more reasonable than today's prices.
I'm sorry, but $40 a month is DEFINITELY not trivial. Even $15 a month is a tidy sum and not to be considered trivial. Unless you happen to be another one of these snot-nosed little rich daddy's kids.
At $40 a month, plus the $50 for the original game and $50 every 6 months for the latest expansion, that's $580 a year. Even at $15 a month, that's $280 a year. For one, simple, freaking, game. A game you can play a max of probably 2 or 3 hours a day during the week (if you want to waste every day in front of your computer); and maybe another 6 or 7 hours a day each weekend (again, if you want to waste every day away in front of your computer).
Sure, if your parents spoil you, pay for all your little toys, and have a maid to wipe your butt, fine. But when you work 50 hours a week, and have 50 bazillion other responsibilities to take care of, you can only afford maybe 5 hours during the week and another 8 hours on the weekends, total. And that's only if you don't have any other hobbies - building rockets, fiddling with electronics, etc (like most geeks do).
Here's a question about something I seriously do not understand.
If you attend an event such as an RNC/DNC kind of convention with a valid ticket, you are permitted to be on that particular private property. If the owners of the property or an appropriate authority want you to leave, they can ask you to leave. If you do not comply with their request, then you are trespassing and can be arrested. That's all fine and dandy. But, how can you be arrested for trespassing if they don't ask you to leave?
Here's an excerpt from that article in the parent poster:
"When Vice President Dick Cheney visited Eugene, Oregon on Sept. 17, a 54-Year old woman named Perry Patterson was charged with criminal trespass for blurting the word "No" when Cheney said that George W. Bush has made the world safer."
Unless there's more to this story than is being reported, then it sounds like no one asked her to leave. Perhaps they asked her to leave but it took her more than 1 second to get off the premises and they assumed she was refusing? And what is more, the excerpt says they even "charge" her with "criminal trespass". Arresting is one thing and doesn't mean any charges will be raised, but charging is a whole different thing.
If this is what it sounds like right now, the whole situation is complete bullshit and these fucking RNC/DNC/NCs need to be put in their place. Just because it's a political convention doesn't mean they can fuck with people and no one will do anything about it.
I have no clue. I never claimed that The Sims series appealed to me, I was just stating the facts:) I played the original Sims when it came out and found it a bit intriguing, but extremely monotonous; and, after a while, excruciatingly painful to continue. Therefore, I dropped it then and never looked back.
Seriously, this bullshit of screwing over the PC customers who made the original GTA and GTA2 a big thing is starting to piss me off. I think TakeTwo is driving the decision though. Because they know that they can release the PS2 version now, and the PC version in a year, and both releases will experience record-breaking sales. So they span the releases out so that they have at least 1 big title for next year to report on their earnings statement. Bunch of bull plop if you ask me...
You have been told wrong. The multiplayer capability is completely original to the creators of MTA. The bad thing about MTA is the rampant cheating. I cracked one program back around 1999 just to learn how to do it and haven't really done much since. After an hour or so of research and loading up some utilities, I was able to crack the MTA executable in about 1 hour. From here, you can basically use the normal GTA config files (that you would modify to change how the game works in single player) and modify them for use in MTA. It's really very easy, and too many people have either done it themselves or provided a crack for others to use that can't figure it out - so every other person in MTA is probably cheating with some speed modifications or something.
In all seriousness, being a vigilante may be the only answer for this. The traits of this e-commerce extortion are indicative of organized crime behaviour. Really, this guy just needed to hire a couple security gurus to track the the guys doing the work. Then a couple of tough guys to go over and rough up the guy doing the work to find out who his bosses are. Then, confirm their involvement in it and take them out of the picture with a silenced 9mm. When this kind of crap happens in Russia or former Soviet Bloc countries, you're on your own. If you do all of the research and give the police every last thing they need to just pick up a guy... fine - they'll do it, but nothing more. So you just "handle" situations your self. And if you clean up after the fact and make it look like the guys that you took out of the picture just disappeared, no one will care. They were scum anyhow.
This one is easy because it describes static thermodynamics (ie a system that isn't continually changing).
So, here we go. Let's assume we have a little ball filled with a gas. The ball has a volume V. The gas inside the ball is at a pressure P. The number of moles of gas we have pumped into the ball is n. The temperature at which the gas inside of the ball is at is T. And scientists before us have determined that all of these parameters are related to each other through a constant, R. So, we know all of this information: we know the V of the ball, we know the P of the gas, we have put in n moles of gas, we know the constant R, and we know the T of the gas.
Now, the equation states PV=nRT is always true for this little 'system' (our ball). So, let's change one of the parameters and see how it affects the other parameters. Let's heat the ball up to raise the T a known certain amount. So, we place the ball in the oven and let it heat up a tad. Now, what has changed? Well, let's assume that the heat does not deform the ball at all, so V doesn't change. We have not put in or let out any moles of gas, so n doesn't change. R never changes (it's a constant). And we have changed T ourselves, so that means that P must change.
So, using the same V, n, and R values as before, plug in the new T temperature value (after heating) and solve for our new P pressure value. This is what the pressure will be after we heat the ball to our new T temperature.
This is the most basic example of how to use this equation. As well, this equation is called the "Ideal or Perfect Gas Law" and assumes all gasses act in a ideal or perfect manner. In reality, gasses don't act exactly ideal or perfect and the ideal gas law needs modification to accurately predict the behavior of real gasses. However, this is a good start and let's you 'roughly' approximate how 'close-to-ideal' gasses behave in simple laboratory experiments.
Awesome! Thank you! I have been struggling with this for a long time. I saw this joke a while ago but couldn't fully appreciate it because it said "time and money" and I always believed that meant addition. However, addition does not fit the equations properly. But as you have so eloquently put it, the amount of women you get is directly proportional to the amount of time you have but is also directly proportional to the amount of money you have. Which fits the equations better AND I believe it characterizes the women-man situation better. Thank you!
No, not plastic drain pipes... while I was writing that post I was thinking in the back of my mind that someone would say that. Plastic drain pipes are a good thing - no pressure on the drain side, easy to run, easy to fix, etc. I'm talking about plastic supply pipes... scary, eh? You've got copper supply pipes, that's good.
Yeh, those plastic water pipes scare me. Not for the freezing reasons, but for everything else. I know it is now considered alright by code, but any high-quality contractor still considers plastic pipes part of a hack job for the el-cheapo contractors. The first time I saw one of those installations I gasped and thought I was seeing another case of people piping gas in their house with PVC (yes this actually happened before), lmao. Couldn't believe it was actually to code once I figured out what it really was.
Slashdot Mirror
Keep in mind, the credit card companies, merchant account companies, and merchant account banks are all completely different entities. I wrote up a summary (leaving out a few details) of how this works here: http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=125307&cid=105 04929
... $833k/month which is nothing for them), and some hardware and property costs (rent, power, etc). Their business is almost a pure profit business. Where they lose money is in other financial endeavors ... making loans to people who default, bad investments, etc.
" Yes, I recognize that the bulk charge would be considerably lower than the individual charge of $.20. However, the credit card companies will realize the same thing and will adjust their rates. the 1.59% rate is based around the fact that the credit card company knows it will be getting an additional $.20."
The companies know about bulk pricing, it isn't a secret. In fact, they created the bulk pricing system as an alternative for certain types of retailers. They aren't going to "realize" anything and adjust their rates. People have been bulk charging for the last 15 years (perhaps even more).
As well, this is not a product being offered, so your notions of mark-up don't apply in the same way as they would apply to a book. The companies actually pay next-to-nothing per credit card transaction. That's why they charge as a percentage of your sale. Let's say you do a $5 sale and your rate is 3%, you pay $0.15 for that transaction. Now, let's say you do a $500 sale and your rate is 1.5%, you pay $7.50 for that transaction. The banks, CC companies, and merchant companies don't care how much the transaction is - it's all the same work for them. The amount of money to be handled is just a variable passed along with the CC info. The fact that they charge one person $0.15 for a service and another person $7.50 for the same exact service should be proof enough that their cost of doing business is practically nothing. Even if all you did were $1 transactions, you could still get a rate of 4% or 5% with no transaction fee. That's $0.04 or $0.05 per transaction, and everyone is still making a profit - the merchant account provider, the merchant account bank, the CC company, the middle man, everyone.
All they have to pay for is some bandwidth each month (CC info is extremely small, no more than 100 bytes required to store all the info), a tech support and management crew (largest cost here: say 100 people @ $100k/year = $10mil/year
My brother (also a fairly technical person) bought me a copy of Windows ME for my birthday one time (before he realized it was a piece of crap). I already knew ME was a piece of crap ... needless to say, I never even removed the shrink-wraping from the box. I meant to return it, but it has been a while now; perhaps I could sell it on eBay...
Morons?
I don't really watch TV anymore. But even so, I still subscribe to basic cable. Here's why: Comcast charges $57/month for internet if you don't already have their cable TV. But, if you buy their basic cable TV package (60 channels or so) for $10/month, they'll reduce their charge for internet from $57/month to $42/month (total of $52/month for cable TV and internet). So even though I don't watch the cable TV, I still pay for it because it's $5 cheaper per month to get TV and internet than it is for internet only. If that's not a sure sign of a monopoly, I don't know what is.
Like perform their job? You have a freaking job to do, do it.
Well, if I could find the forum where I posted my numbers, I would show them to you, but I can't. Perhaps this sounds convenient for my argument, and maybe it is, but that's the fact. I was extremely liberal with my numbers and padded most of them an extra 100%, most technical people in the forum also agreed with my numbers based on their experience as IT managers, system operators, etc.
... closer to $0.02 or $0.03 per transaction. Which would make the rate 1.79% for $0.03 on $15.
Those CCAvenue people are out of their mind for retail business, perhaps they are customized for some specialty sector. If not, I'm surprised that they are even in business.
Your 2.88% number doesn't take into account bulk charging as I mentioned above. Basically, you collect all of your charges for the day and actually charge them all together at the end of the day as a bulk charge. You still check that funds are available at the point of sale, but you don't complete the transaction until you've collected all the charges for the day. (Many gas stations do this when you pre-pay at the pump, and that's why you'll notice a hold on your card for mybe $100 for 2 weeks after the fill-up even though it only cost $25.39 or whatever.) Then, you can use a bulk charge rate instead of the $0.20 rate and the effective charge-per-transaction is much less
And if someone is offering an UP-FRONT rate to just ANYONE of 1.59%, what makes you think they won't cut that in half for someone willing to do millions of dollars in business with them? Sorry, but you're being a bit naive here. My total base rate runs around 2.5% and I am an ant compared to Sony or Blizzard, etc. Common sense begs you to believe that the price any of them pay is AT LEAST less than half of what I pay.
That, or people already know where all the pr0n is located and don't need to search for it. In this day and age with all of the "Thumb Collection" websites (for both images and video), why not just go directly to the sites?
Of course, I wouldn't know first hand, I'm just relaying information that I've heard from "people I know".
Well, now you're forcing your beliefs on me. Why should I be forced by the government to help other countries and other people out because you want to? Where's my freedom to make a decision about my own money? You are effectively forcing me to follow one of your beliefs. That's not the freedom this country was based on.
Actually, I was basing my statements on the fact that I am a retailer on the side, and I know how charging CCs work and how small business economics work. A base of 4% to 5% is ridiculous for anyone, even the smallest of companies just starting out. Just look around online for merchant accounts and you can see what the real costs are. The writers of that book are just plain lying to you.
And, I would hope that any company like Sony, Blizzard, etc, would be able to leverage their buying power to negotiate a much lower rate. In fact, my particular business would probably get the worst rate of any type of business based on the types of charging I am doing. My average charge is around $10 and my average monthly volume is less than $3000 a month. And, I only charge from online purchases (another factor that raises the rate, versus charging in a physical retail location). Even then, my total base rate is still only around 2.5% of the charge. Sony, etc could do bulk charging where they charge 100 people at a time, and their average charge would jump up to $1000. And they would probably do at least $150000 in sales a month (10,000 users). With those numbers, and the rest of Sony's, Blizzard's, etc buying power, I would be suprised if they couldn't negotiate a rate under 1%.
Look at the numbers yourself, research merchant accounts, you can see they're just straight out lying to you.
Yeh, I'll laugh when you die of a heart attack before retirement from chronic sleep deprivation. Sorry if I believe in good health, but I can feel smug over here knowing that it sucks to be you. And as far as the money is concerned, I earn more than the yearly cost of the game in 1 day (which isn't exactly on the rich-and-famous level, but enough to be comfy). But that $280 is better spent on an investment, or perhaps 6 different fun games in a year, not just 1.
"Huh. Interesting, since Mulligan and Patrovsky estimate that most companies would lose half of your estimate simply on the credit card transfaction fees, credit card charge failures, expired cards, fraud, and free month. (Their estimate is 10% of what is being charged never reaches the company.)" lmao. If that really were true, it would apply to any company, right? There's nothing unique to someone developing MMORPGs when it comes to charging credit cards. So 1/2 of that number would be $1.50, 10% of the $15 they get. If your average small retail business lost 10% of their monthly revenue right off the bat, they would go under in a year. But that doesn't happen does it? No. In fact, over 80% of new businesses stay open for at least 2 years (check the US Census data). The estimates used by Mulligan and Patrovsky and probably including menial expenses used in other areas of the company. That, or they're inflating their numbers due to gaming studio woes (they're not exactly what we would call an "unbiased" source).
Yeah, I'm sure they're not taking your $15/month, pocketing $10 of it, and then pumping the remaining $5 into development of a new expansion for you to buy.
/. - I'm not which forum I did it in) and I was able to determine that $3 per month was a very liberal estimate (in the developer's favor) for the costs of keeping up an MMORPG system.
... $72/year ... much more reasonable than today's prices.
My point is: fine, it takes money to keep the servers up, to provide the bandwidth, make minor performance improvements, etc. But it doesn't take $15/month. I did an extensive cost analysis back before SWG came out because I thought the MMORPG costs were ridiculous (and I might have even posted it to
Double that number to allow for profits, and you've got $6/month
Trivial?
I'm sorry, but $40 a month is DEFINITELY not trivial. Even $15 a month is a tidy sum and not to be considered trivial. Unless you happen to be another one of these snot-nosed little rich daddy's kids.
At $40 a month, plus the $50 for the original game and $50 every 6 months for the latest expansion, that's $580 a year. Even at $15 a month, that's $280 a year. For one, simple, freaking, game. A game you can play a max of probably 2 or 3 hours a day during the week (if you want to waste every day in front of your computer); and maybe another 6 or 7 hours a day each weekend (again, if you want to waste every day away in front of your computer).
Sure, if your parents spoil you, pay for all your little toys, and have a maid to wipe your butt, fine. But when you work 50 hours a week, and have 50 bazillion other responsibilities to take care of, you can only afford maybe 5 hours during the week and another 8 hours on the weekends, total. And that's only if you don't have any other hobbies - building rockets, fiddling with electronics, etc (like most geeks do).
I have a simple solution:
1. Find out who is sending the extortion threats.
2. Break their legs.
3. Shoot them in the knee caps.
4. Profit.
Here's a question about something I seriously do not understand.
If you attend an event such as an RNC/DNC kind of convention with a valid ticket, you are permitted to be on that particular private property. If the owners of the property or an appropriate authority want you to leave, they can ask you to leave. If you do not comply with their request, then you are trespassing and can be arrested. That's all fine and dandy. But, how can you be arrested for trespassing if they don't ask you to leave?
Here's an excerpt from that article in the parent poster:
"When Vice President Dick Cheney visited Eugene, Oregon on Sept. 17, a 54-Year old woman named Perry Patterson was charged with criminal trespass for blurting the word "No" when Cheney said that George W. Bush has made the world safer."
Unless there's more to this story than is being reported, then it sounds like no one asked her to leave. Perhaps they asked her to leave but it took her more than 1 second to get off the premises and they assumed she was refusing? And what is more, the excerpt says they even "charge" her with "criminal trespass". Arresting is one thing and doesn't mean any charges will be raised, but charging is a whole different thing.
If this is what it sounds like right now, the whole situation is complete bullshit and these fucking RNC/DNC/NCs need to be put in their place. Just because it's a political convention doesn't mean they can fuck with people and no one will do anything about it.
I have no clue. I never claimed that The Sims series appealed to me, I was just stating the facts :) I played the original Sims when it came out and found it a bit intriguing, but extremely monotonous; and, after a while, excruciatingly painful to continue. Therefore, I dropped it then and never looked back.
"There's such a thing as too much realism. I mean, who wants to eat and work out and ride a bicycle in a video game?"
I guess that explains why The Sims series is doing so poorly, eh?
"...stuck to her hand..." "...until she passes out from exhaustion..."
Well, we all know where this is going.
Seriously, this bullshit of screwing over the PC customers who made the original GTA and GTA2 a big thing is starting to piss me off. I think TakeTwo is driving the decision though. Because they know that they can release the PS2 version now, and the PC version in a year, and both releases will experience record-breaking sales. So they span the releases out so that they have at least 1 big title for next year to report on their earnings statement. Bunch of bull plop if you ask me ...
You have been told wrong. The multiplayer capability is completely original to the creators of MTA. The bad thing about MTA is the rampant cheating. I cracked one program back around 1999 just to learn how to do it and haven't really done much since. After an hour or so of research and loading up some utilities, I was able to crack the MTA executable in about 1 hour. From here, you can basically use the normal GTA config files (that you would modify to change how the game works in single player) and modify them for use in MTA. It's really very easy, and too many people have either done it themselves or provided a crack for others to use that can't figure it out - so every other person in MTA is probably cheating with some speed modifications or something.
In all seriousness, being a vigilante may be the only answer for this. The traits of this e-commerce extortion are indicative of organized crime behaviour. Really, this guy just needed to hire a couple security gurus to track the the guys doing the work. Then a couple of tough guys to go over and rough up the guy doing the work to find out who his bosses are. Then, confirm their involvement in it and take them out of the picture with a silenced 9mm. When this kind of crap happens in Russia or former Soviet Bloc countries, you're on your own. If you do all of the research and give the police every last thing they need to just pick up a guy ... fine - they'll do it, but nothing more. So you just "handle" situations your self. And if you clean up after the fact and make it look like the guys that you took out of the picture just disappeared, no one will care. They were scum anyhow.
This one is easy because it describes static thermodynamics (ie a system that isn't continually changing).
So, here we go. Let's assume we have a little ball filled with a gas. The ball has a volume V. The gas inside the ball is at a pressure P. The number of moles of gas we have pumped into the ball is n. The temperature at which the gas inside of the ball is at is T. And scientists before us have determined that all of these parameters are related to each other through a constant, R. So, we know all of this information: we know the V of the ball, we know the P of the gas, we have put in n moles of gas, we know the constant R, and we know the T of the gas.
Now, the equation states PV=nRT is always true for this little 'system' (our ball). So, let's change one of the parameters and see how it affects the other parameters. Let's heat the ball up to raise the T a known certain amount. So, we place the ball in the oven and let it heat up a tad. Now, what has changed? Well, let's assume that the heat does not deform the ball at all, so V doesn't change. We have not put in or let out any moles of gas, so n doesn't change. R never changes (it's a constant). And we have changed T ourselves, so that means that P must change.
So, using the same V, n, and R values as before, plug in the new T temperature value (after heating) and solve for our new P pressure value. This is what the pressure will be after we heat the ball to our new T temperature.
This is the most basic example of how to use this equation. As well, this equation is called the "Ideal or Perfect Gas Law" and assumes all gasses act in a ideal or perfect manner. In reality, gasses don't act exactly ideal or perfect and the ideal gas law needs modification to accurately predict the behavior of real gasses. However, this is a good start and let's you 'roughly' approximate how 'close-to-ideal' gasses behave in simple laboratory experiments.
Awesome! Thank you! I have been struggling with this for a long time. I saw this joke a while ago but couldn't fully appreciate it because it said "time and money" and I always believed that meant addition. However, addition does not fit the equations properly. But as you have so eloquently put it, the amount of women you get is directly proportional to the amount of time you have but is also directly proportional to the amount of money you have. Which fits the equations better AND I believe it characterizes the women-man situation better. Thank you!
No, not plastic drain pipes ... while I was writing that post I was thinking in the back of my mind that someone would say that. Plastic drain pipes are a good thing - no pressure on the drain side, easy to run, easy to fix, etc. I'm talking about plastic supply pipes ... scary, eh? You've got copper supply pipes, that's good.
Yeh, those plastic water pipes scare me. Not for the freezing reasons, but for everything else. I know it is now considered alright by code, but any high-quality contractor still considers plastic pipes part of a hack job for the el-cheapo contractors. The first time I saw one of those installations I gasped and thought I was seeing another case of people piping gas in their house with PVC (yes this actually happened before), lmao. Couldn't believe it was actually to code once I figured out what it really was.