It's that the poor African school-age child lost access to the OLPC that was never shipped to Africa,
I was trying to remember the blue-sky utopian program that was supposed to put laptops in the hands of kids in Africa. I gave up on them when they couldn't manage to fulfill their BOGO deal after I paid them. They kept coming up with excuses for not sending me the one they owed me. They tried pushing it past the three month, IIRC, time frame where I could cancel the order, so I cancelled it. Are any of those people still alive?
How do I know Xfinity hasn't whitelisted it (for "convenience") on their network
How do you know that Comcast hasn't broken into your house and installed a camera in your bathroom? Have you checked recently?
so it can automatically connect to any nearby Xfinity Wifi network, no password required?
Because in about five minutes some wily hacker will have sniffed the WiFi traffic and posted full information about how to get free WiFi by pretending to be hawguy's TV.
They're hacking password-protected WiFi, so why would nobody be interested in hacking password-less WiFi that is available on a wide scale?
yet you think a smart TV is incapable of identifying a movie based on some audio/video signature?
Non-sequitor. If you don't watch broadcast TV, then your "smart TV" isn't going to be hearing anything from broadcast TV and won't be able to collect data about what OTA TV you are watching. If you want the fact that you watch movies on your TV to be secret, don't tell us. We are notoriously bad at keeping your secrets.
I use my TV mainly to watch movies, it's hard to find an affordable 60" panel that's not also a "smart TV".
If you don't watch broadcast TV, they won't have any data to collect on you. If you use your TV to watch movies and want to keep that fact a secret, don't tell the world by posting to/.
Yes i am. It's just fun, total bullshit, but a good idea, if it is fine right
It would be interesting if Earth-bound governments started enforcing the concept that you cannot swear 'true faith and allegiance" to more than one country at a time, and start cancelling the Earth-bound citizenships of anyone who adopts Asgardia. "You're not a citizen of the US? Where's your immigration paperwork? Oh, you don't have any? Well.... hi ho, hi ho, it's off to Gitmo you go..." Lotsa fun. I laugh all day.
Why would the spammer, even one with an IQ lower than a brick, engage with a different reply address?
How do you know what email address will appear in a reply to something you send someone? If you think it will always be the address you sent the email to, then let me introduce you to the concept of "email forwarding service", such as those run by IEEE, ACM, ARRL, and thousands of other organizations and companies. I have an email address at all three of the ones I listed, plus a dozen more, and I am likely to reply using a completely different address if I do reply. It's more effort to change my outgoing email address than it is often worth.
Even without such a service, many email providers (like corporate ones) have multiple domain names that all route to the same mailboxes, with just one of them on outgoing email.
Since the goal of the spammer is often just to validate the recipient's address, having Re:scam reply on your behalf accomplishes that. Even if the main goal is not just validation, any reply can help the spammer. Given that a lot, if not most, spam these days is trying to get the victim to buy something at a website, the reply will not start an exchange and not waste anyone's time. The reply address is either completely invalid, or will be used only to scan for addresses to validate. After validation, the recipient's address can be sold as valid and the amount of spam goes up, not down.
I don't think you really understood my comment. At all. I explicitly stated that the case in the summary isn't the norm,
You also explicitly referred to it as a "fake date", whether it is the "norm" for such a date or not. It is so far outside the "norm" for "date" that it truly isn't the same thing.
Using the ubiquitous car analogy, it would be like you claiming that someone who described a Japanese bullet train was just describing an automobile, just not the normal automobile. The differences are so large and significant that nobody could say that an automobile is just an abnormal bullet train.
if you want to use that case to somehow say I'm wrong about my observations, you'd have to start with that; proving that the case in the summary is the norm rather than the exception.
Wrong again. I don't have to prove that anything in the summary is normal, only that you are wrong. It isn't a "fake date". Trying to claim it is means you don't understand the vast difference between being someone's date and someone's father. I tried explaining those differences to you, but you apparently did not understand them.
I'm sorry if your experience with a father (or mother, depending on the case) was more like a "fake date" than a true parent/child relationship, but the vast majority of the world understands that the two things are not, and should not be, alike. There are times when father/daughter activities might look like they are on a "date", but the underlying relationship still exists. It is that relationship that makes calling it a "fake date" so ludicrous.
Forcing to tolerate? What the fuck does that even mean? Not letting you beat people up you don't like?
You are the only one talking about beating anyone up. Projection is something you should seek help for.
I mean simple things, like "you run a business that bakes cakes, so you must bake a gay couple a cake no matter how you feel about the matter." Or "you're a parent of a ten year old girl and you find out that there is a 'boy' who claims he feels like a girl so 'he' gets to use the girls showers after PE." Or you're a woman standing in the women's rest room and a couple of men walk in.
I expect that you will now attack me for using these examples, which will pretty much prove the point for me. The level of vitriol directed at people who do not accept the "new normal" is astounding. Trying to claim that it isn't trying to force people to accept that new normal would be laughable.
I know stepfathers who continue their relationship with their step children after divorces.
Critical thought in that sentence: after divorces. He can't be her step-father "after a divorce" is he was never married to her mother.
Also divorced stepfathers rarely have any easily provable legal ties to ex wives unless there was alimony involved.
Uhhh, there's a little thing called a marriage certificate.
It's a moot point, since you are saying that you replace the lie "Lucy, I am your father" with "Lucy, I am your step father" after 8 years. A "father" doesn't turn into "step-father", and if the step-father was never married to the mother then he doesn't turn into a step-father at all. "Father" doesn't need matrimony to be one; step-fathers only assume that role after that happens. Otherwise it is "boyfriend".
And, in any case, a lie like this will not turn out well for anyone involved, even the duplicitous mother.
"He's your stepfather who doesn't eat or sleep here, and he's never around except for functions where you need "a father", and he's not married to your Mom..." Yeah, that lie is so much more believable.
In the US an "escort" is exactly what is described in the summary; a fake date.
What is described in the summary is not a "fake date". This is someone who is being paid by a third party to act as if he's a girl's father. This is a long-term usually genetic relationship, which involves deep emotional ties and trust. A "fake date" ends at the end of the night, it's a low-level social interaction for a few hours.
Those who hire escorts to attend some function with them are fully aware of the situation and the temporary status of the "relationship". They are generally not deluded enough to think that the escort is there because he or she loves and cares about them, and that the escort is interested in any way in a long-term relationship.
When you have a company providing "escorts", you don't ask the clients if they are okay with keeping up "the lie" forever.
It is true that prostitutes often pretend they're escorts;
They don't pretend to be escorts. They tell the police or a worried john that they are "escorts" because "escort" is legal and in almost all places "prostitute" is illegal. The john is still expecting sex for his money; he's just coordinating their stories in advance should a copper start asking questions.
I think RENTING a father for 8 YEARS takes it to a new level.
It's cheaper than the real thing.
Ummm, I don't know about your childhood, but for me and most of the people I know, a father results in a positive cash flow for the family, not negative. Even if Mom is the breadwinner, Pop is usually providing parenting services that would cost a lot to buy elsewhere.
The true cost comes in emotional damage when Pop leaves, again, because Mom stops paying him to be there. Or when Pop says "I ain't payin' for your college, bitch, I ain't your real dad."
Allow me to pick a nit. I think it's accurate to say, "there's a real relationship." But the relationship that the girl thinks she has is fabricated.
While it started as a paid service, if the girl believes that this person is her father, is the relationship itself fabricated -- to her? Does it matter otherwise?
Calling off the relationship would be heartless but, as an adult, I think the girl deserves to know the truth.
The heartless participant in this facade is the mother. She's letting her daughter think that this is her real father. The daughter is going to find out at some point. That may be when Mom stops paying "Pop" to be "Pop" and he walks. (Twice the problem -- the girl may think she's being abandoned by her real father, or she learns the person she's trusted for so long is really a fake.) That may be when daughter says "hey, Pop, I want to go to college. How much financial aid can I count on you for?" It may be when daughter has a medical issue that requires information about her parents, and the info from "Pop" proves he can't be her father after all (blood type, for example). But it will come out.
Lying to her in the first place I feel was a mistake on the mother's part.
It was patently stupid. The girl was being harassed by others because she didn't have a father. Suddenly this guy shows up and is her father. He's been seeing her for 8 years and she's just graduating high school. She's what, 17, 18 now? She was 9 or 10 when he suddenly appeared. Wouldn't any normal 9 or 10 year old who knows she's being harassed for not having a father be suspicious of anyone who appears as if by magic to fill that role? But more important, wouldn't a person of that age be able to understand "this is a guy who will pretend to be your dad for things where a dad would show up, to keep you from being harassed about it"?
That is a common English idiom. "Wearing your heart on your sleeve", "wearing your emotions on your sleeve", etc. It means exactly like it sounds -- people who display what they are feeling for all to see.
The idea is that they will have to manually sift through thousands of emails per day to find the real mark,
If Re.scam is to engage them in an ongoing conversation to waste their time, then Re.scam must use a valid, replyable email address. The "proxy address" that the summary refers to.
If you and I can filter email based on a domain, why don't you think that a spammer can do that, too? Especially spammers who don't care what your email reply is, they're looking for you to visit their website to order their scam products or log in or whatever?
If it were so trivially easy then I wouldn't still be getting spam and there wouldn't be valid emails showing up in my spam filters.
It is trivially easy to automate forwarding of email, that is true, at least for some email systems. What is hard is perfect detection of what is and is not spam. I doubt your friends would appreciate getting some chat-bot response to an email they send you that was improperly classified.
Is it common to include your target's information in the body of your initial scam invitation?
Of course. With HTML-ized email, it is almost standard practice to include at a minimum a 1 pixel blank image with an encoded URL. You don't see it, but the website logs that you retrieved it. That not only tells them that the email address is valid, but that someone reads the email going there.
And when the question is asked about "selling your email address to spammers", it's not the Re.scam people you need to worry about. It's the spammer who sent you the probe to see if the email address was valid. Getting a response, any response, means the address is. That makes it more valuable to spammers, and they pay for that info.
TFA does acknowledge that their efforts will result in a lot of bots talking to other bots.
Yeah, and you'll be the middleman, forwarding all the spam you are getting to Re.scam so they can validate your email address to the spammer for you, which results in more spam to be forwarded. Aren't you pleased to become a pipeline for these people?
Now ask this: what is the Re.scam business model? Where are they making money? They can't sell ads because nobody thinks sending ads to "bots" is worth anything. Where does the money come from?
More or less by accident, and being easier to use (Specifically in the payment department) than everyone else.
Being easier to use isn't something that happens by accident.
Amazon got where it is by starting with one narrow market and then expanding. Amazon USED to be "books". Amazon had a big warehouse full of books, much more inventory than any brick and mortar could manage. The B&M could special order anything you wanted, but at that point they lost their advantage of immediate purchase. They always lost when it came to convenience for things that weren't needed immediately.
They won the book market, new and used.
Then they added "this". Then "that". Then "everything".
it seems like a number of their vendors just buy stuff down at the local Wal Mart and sell it for 2 - 5 times the price on Amazon.
Amazon is not responsible for what the vendors use for supply chain, or prices. If this is true, then Amazon probably sells it for less and a vendor is cutting it's own throat.
This isn't abnormal at all. I've caught the local convenience store (across the street from my office) shopping at the local grocery store and even the closest big box, and then they mark things up quite a bit. You want it right now, you pay for convenience. That's how the marketplace works.
This really isn't anything new. There are a ton of GSA approved vendors, many of them have "one-stop shopping" sites that do direct billing.
And the idea of combining them into a one-stop buying portal isn't new either. We've got one here -- one central buying portal with several vendors where the end user can "buy" things, the authorization goes to an accounting person who makes sure the money is available and the buyer is authorized, and then the bill goes to accounts payable.
And Amazon, while one of the vendors, certainly isn't the only one. Like you say, Graybar is one I remember. Office Max for sure for office products. And adding more vendors is a bookkeeping process that starts with a simple request from a buyer.
Yawn. The feds are catching up with the rest of the world. Film at 11.
I suspect it will work like everything else in America. Company X has the resources to "contribute" to a politicians campaigns in return for "recommending" their portal.
Politicians don't recommend portals.
We have a buying system at our Uni. Just implemented. It has a dozen vendors, including, I think, Amazon. It certainly includes Staples or Office Max. Adding a vendor to the portal requires asking. That's all. Then the accounting folks set it all up.
This isn't a vast conspiracy for some huge monopoly to take over the planet. There's too many vendors involved to call it a monopoly.
A bunch of companies jockeying for position.
Yes, that's what it is. There are a bunch of companies involved. You just shot your conspiracy in the foot. It's not just Amazon.
I think first to market doesn't play that big of a role.
Amazon is not "first to market" on the concept of a buying system with a direct link into a company order system.
All in all, one company should not be the sole proprietor of a portal for purchasing products, government or not.
One company should be the maintainer of their portal from the buying system into their ordering system. Who else should do that? The government manages the buying system, who else did you think would worry about that level of red tape?
Slashdot Mirror
It's that the poor African school-age child lost access to the OLPC that was never shipped to Africa,
I was trying to remember the blue-sky utopian program that was supposed to put laptops in the hands of kids in Africa. I gave up on them when they couldn't manage to fulfill their BOGO deal after I paid them. They kept coming up with excuses for not sending me the one they owed me. They tried pushing it past the three month, IIRC, time frame where I could cancel the order, so I cancelled it. Are any of those people still alive?
How do I know Xfinity hasn't whitelisted it (for "convenience") on their network
How do you know that Comcast hasn't broken into your house and installed a camera in your bathroom? Have you checked recently?
so it can automatically connect to any nearby Xfinity Wifi network, no password required?
Because in about five minutes some wily hacker will have sniffed the WiFi traffic and posted full information about how to get free WiFi by pretending to be hawguy's TV.
They're hacking password-protected WiFi, so why would nobody be interested in hacking password-less WiFi that is available on a wide scale?
yet you think a smart TV is incapable of identifying a movie based on some audio/video signature?
Non-sequitor. If you don't watch broadcast TV, then your "smart TV" isn't going to be hearing anything from broadcast TV and won't be able to collect data about what OTA TV you are watching. If you want the fact that you watch movies on your TV to be secret, don't tell us. We are notoriously bad at keeping your secrets.
We don't interact with it other than channel surfing. All stuff they can already gather.
How does an OTA broadcaster know what you are watching, or IF you are watching?
ATSC 1.0 works without an Internet connection for two-way communication.
You have an interesting, and wrong, definition of "two".
I use my TV mainly to watch movies, it's hard to find an affordable 60" panel that's not also a "smart TV".
If you don't watch broadcast TV, they won't have any data to collect on you. If you use your TV to watch movies and want to keep that fact a secret, don't tell the world by posting to /.
Yes i am. It's just fun, total bullshit, but a good idea, if it is fine right
It would be interesting if Earth-bound governments started enforcing the concept that you cannot swear 'true faith and allegiance" to more than one country at a time, and start cancelling the Earth-bound citizenships of anyone who adopts Asgardia. "You're not a citizen of the US? Where's your immigration paperwork? Oh, you don't have any? Well .... hi ho, hi ho, it's off to Gitmo you go..." Lotsa fun. I laugh all day.
Why would the spammer, even one with an IQ lower than a brick, engage with a different reply address?
How do you know what email address will appear in a reply to something you send someone? If you think it will always be the address you sent the email to, then let me introduce you to the concept of "email forwarding service", such as those run by IEEE, ACM, ARRL, and thousands of other organizations and companies. I have an email address at all three of the ones I listed, plus a dozen more, and I am likely to reply using a completely different address if I do reply. It's more effort to change my outgoing email address than it is often worth.
Even without such a service, many email providers (like corporate ones) have multiple domain names that all route to the same mailboxes, with just one of them on outgoing email.
Since the goal of the spammer is often just to validate the recipient's address, having Re:scam reply on your behalf accomplishes that. Even if the main goal is not just validation, any reply can help the spammer. Given that a lot, if not most, spam these days is trying to get the victim to buy something at a website, the reply will not start an exchange and not waste anyone's time. The reply address is either completely invalid, or will be used only to scan for addresses to validate. After validation, the recipient's address can be sold as valid and the amount of spam goes up, not down.
I don't think you really understood my comment. At all. I explicitly stated that the case in the summary isn't the norm,
You also explicitly referred to it as a "fake date", whether it is the "norm" for such a date or not. It is so far outside the "norm" for "date" that it truly isn't the same thing. Using the ubiquitous car analogy, it would be like you claiming that someone who described a Japanese bullet train was just describing an automobile, just not the normal automobile. The differences are so large and significant that nobody could say that an automobile is just an abnormal bullet train.
if you want to use that case to somehow say I'm wrong about my observations, you'd have to start with that; proving that the case in the summary is the norm rather than the exception.
Wrong again. I don't have to prove that anything in the summary is normal, only that you are wrong. It isn't a "fake date". Trying to claim it is means you don't understand the vast difference between being someone's date and someone's father. I tried explaining those differences to you, but you apparently did not understand them.
I'm sorry if your experience with a father (or mother, depending on the case) was more like a "fake date" than a true parent/child relationship, but the vast majority of the world understands that the two things are not, and should not be, alike. There are times when father/daughter activities might look like they are on a "date", but the underlying relationship still exists. It is that relationship that makes calling it a "fake date" so ludicrous.
Forcing to tolerate? What the fuck does that even mean? Not letting you beat people up you don't like?
You are the only one talking about beating anyone up. Projection is something you should seek help for.
I mean simple things, like "you run a business that bakes cakes, so you must bake a gay couple a cake no matter how you feel about the matter." Or "you're a parent of a ten year old girl and you find out that there is a 'boy' who claims he feels like a girl so 'he' gets to use the girls showers after PE." Or you're a woman standing in the women's rest room and a couple of men walk in.
I expect that you will now attack me for using these examples, which will pretty much prove the point for me. The level of vitriol directed at people who do not accept the "new normal" is astounding. Trying to claim that it isn't trying to force people to accept that new normal would be laughable.
Forcing tolerance is what Jesus would want.
I love it when antitheists try to tell us about religion. No, sorry, the part about "force" is a dead giveaway that you are wrong.
I know stepfathers who continue their relationship with their step children after divorces.
Critical thought in that sentence: after divorces. He can't be her step-father "after a divorce" is he was never married to her mother.
Also divorced stepfathers rarely have any easily provable legal ties to ex wives unless there was alimony involved.
Uhhh, there's a little thing called a marriage certificate.
It's a moot point, since you are saying that you replace the lie "Lucy, I am your father" with "Lucy, I am your step father" after 8 years. A "father" doesn't turn into "step-father", and if the step-father was never married to the mother then he doesn't turn into a step-father at all. "Father" doesn't need matrimony to be one; step-fathers only assume that role after that happens. Otherwise it is "boyfriend".
And, in any case, a lie like this will not turn out well for anyone involved, even the duplicitous mother.
Stop buying 500 dollar screws... :)
Are you posting in the right thread? Did you mean to post this over there?
He's your stepfather.
"He's your stepfather who doesn't eat or sleep here, and he's never around except for functions where you need "a father", and he's not married to your Mom ..." Yeah, that lie is so much more believable.
In the US an "escort" is exactly what is described in the summary; a fake date.
What is described in the summary is not a "fake date". This is someone who is being paid by a third party to act as if he's a girl's father. This is a long-term usually genetic relationship, which involves deep emotional ties and trust. A "fake date" ends at the end of the night, it's a low-level social interaction for a few hours.
Those who hire escorts to attend some function with them are fully aware of the situation and the temporary status of the "relationship". They are generally not deluded enough to think that the escort is there because he or she loves and cares about them, and that the escort is interested in any way in a long-term relationship.
When you have a company providing "escorts", you don't ask the clients if they are okay with keeping up "the lie" forever.
It is true that prostitutes often pretend they're escorts;
They don't pretend to be escorts. They tell the police or a worried john that they are "escorts" because "escort" is legal and in almost all places "prostitute" is illegal. The john is still expecting sex for his money; he's just coordinating their stories in advance should a copper start asking questions.
Allowing people to be whatever they want is a a LOT different than forcing your beliefs on people.
You mean forcing people to tolerate things that they don't believe are right but you do isn't forcing your beliefs on them?
I think RENTING a father for 8 YEARS takes it to a new level.
It's cheaper than the real thing.
Ummm, I don't know about your childhood, but for me and most of the people I know, a father results in a positive cash flow for the family, not negative. Even if Mom is the breadwinner, Pop is usually providing parenting services that would cost a lot to buy elsewhere.
The true cost comes in emotional damage when Pop leaves, again, because Mom stops paying him to be there. Or when Pop says "I ain't payin' for your college, bitch, I ain't your real dad."
Allow me to pick a nit. I think it's accurate to say, "there's a real relationship." But the relationship that the girl thinks she has is fabricated.
While it started as a paid service, if the girl believes that this person is her father, is the relationship itself fabricated -- to her? Does it matter otherwise?
Calling off the relationship would be heartless but, as an adult, I think the girl deserves to know the truth.
The heartless participant in this facade is the mother. She's letting her daughter think that this is her real father. The daughter is going to find out at some point. That may be when Mom stops paying "Pop" to be "Pop" and he walks. (Twice the problem -- the girl may think she's being abandoned by her real father, or she learns the person she's trusted for so long is really a fake.) That may be when daughter says "hey, Pop, I want to go to college. How much financial aid can I count on you for?" It may be when daughter has a medical issue that requires information about her parents, and the info from "Pop" proves he can't be her father after all (blood type, for example). But it will come out.
Lying to her in the first place I feel was a mistake on the mother's part.
It was patently stupid. The girl was being harassed by others because she didn't have a father. Suddenly this guy shows up and is her father. He's been seeing her for 8 years and she's just graduating high school. She's what, 17, 18 now? She was 9 or 10 when he suddenly appeared. Wouldn't any normal 9 or 10 year old who knows she's being harassed for not having a father be suspicious of anyone who appears as if by magic to fill that role? But more important, wouldn't a person of that age be able to understand "this is a guy who will pretend to be your dad for things where a dad would show up, to keep you from being harassed about it"?
That is a common English idiom. "Wearing your heart on your sleeve", "wearing your emotions on your sleeve", etc. It means exactly like it sounds -- people who display what they are feeling for all to see.
The idea is that they will have to manually sift through thousands of emails per day to find the real mark,
If Re.scam is to engage them in an ongoing conversation to waste their time, then Re.scam must use a valid, replyable email address. The "proxy address" that the summary refers to.
If you and I can filter email based on a domain, why don't you think that a spammer can do that, too? Especially spammers who don't care what your email reply is, they're looking for you to visit their website to order their scam products or log in or whatever?
Um.. .yeah of course. It's trivially easy.
If it were so trivially easy then I wouldn't still be getting spam and there wouldn't be valid emails showing up in my spam filters.
It is trivially easy to automate forwarding of email, that is true, at least for some email systems. What is hard is perfect detection of what is and is not spam. I doubt your friends would appreciate getting some chat-bot response to an email they send you that was improperly classified.
Is it common to include your target's information in the body of your initial scam invitation?
Of course. With HTML-ized email, it is almost standard practice to include at a minimum a 1 pixel blank image with an encoded URL. You don't see it, but the website logs that you retrieved it. That not only tells them that the email address is valid, but that someone reads the email going there.
And when the question is asked about "selling your email address to spammers", it's not the Re.scam people you need to worry about. It's the spammer who sent you the probe to see if the email address was valid. Getting a response, any response, means the address is. That makes it more valuable to spammers, and they pay for that info.
TFA does acknowledge that their efforts will result in a lot of bots talking to other bots.
Yeah, and you'll be the middleman, forwarding all the spam you are getting to Re.scam so they can validate your email address to the spammer for you, which results in more spam to be forwarded. Aren't you pleased to become a pipeline for these people?
Now ask this: what is the Re.scam business model? Where are they making money? They can't sell ads because nobody thinks sending ads to "bots" is worth anything. Where does the money come from?
More or less by accident, and being easier to use (Specifically in the payment department) than everyone else.
Being easier to use isn't something that happens by accident.
Amazon got where it is by starting with one narrow market and then expanding. Amazon USED to be "books". Amazon had a big warehouse full of books, much more inventory than any brick and mortar could manage. The B&M could special order anything you wanted, but at that point they lost their advantage of immediate purchase. They always lost when it came to convenience for things that weren't needed immediately.
They won the book market, new and used.
Then they added "this". Then "that". Then "everything".
it seems like a number of their vendors just buy stuff down at the local Wal Mart and sell it for 2 - 5 times the price on Amazon.
Amazon is not responsible for what the vendors use for supply chain, or prices. If this is true, then Amazon probably sells it for less and a vendor is cutting it's own throat.
This isn't abnormal at all. I've caught the local convenience store (across the street from my office) shopping at the local grocery store and even the closest big box, and then they mark things up quite a bit. You want it right now, you pay for convenience. That's how the marketplace works.
This really isn't anything new. There are a ton of GSA approved vendors, many of them have "one-stop shopping" sites that do direct billing.
And the idea of combining them into a one-stop buying portal isn't new either. We've got one here -- one central buying portal with several vendors where the end user can "buy" things, the authorization goes to an accounting person who makes sure the money is available and the buyer is authorized, and then the bill goes to accounts payable.
And Amazon, while one of the vendors, certainly isn't the only one. Like you say, Graybar is one I remember. Office Max for sure for office products. And adding more vendors is a bookkeeping process that starts with a simple request from a buyer.
Yawn. The feds are catching up with the rest of the world. Film at 11.
I suspect it will work like everything else in America. Company X has the resources to "contribute" to a politicians campaigns in return for "recommending" their portal.
Politicians don't recommend portals.
We have a buying system at our Uni. Just implemented. It has a dozen vendors, including, I think, Amazon. It certainly includes Staples or Office Max. Adding a vendor to the portal requires asking. That's all. Then the accounting folks set it all up.
This isn't a vast conspiracy for some huge monopoly to take over the planet. There's too many vendors involved to call it a monopoly.
A bunch of companies jockeying for position.
Yes, that's what it is. There are a bunch of companies involved. You just shot your conspiracy in the foot. It's not just Amazon.
I think first to market doesn't play that big of a role.
Amazon is not "first to market" on the concept of a buying system with a direct link into a company order system.
All in all, one company should not be the sole proprietor of a portal for purchasing products, government or not.
One company should be the maintainer of their portal from the buying system into their ordering system. Who else should do that? The government manages the buying system, who else did you think would worry about that level of red tape?