Anyone have any insights into this situation?
Change your resume so that the point of contact you list for the company that gives you a bad reference is one of your previous supervisors that gave you good references. That person may no longer work there, but your prospective employer would probably value the opinion of your ex-supervisor more than someone who just happens to work there now.
I empathize with you, but it's the nature of our increasingly litigious society that is causing things like this, unfortunately. If only we could figure out a way to reverse that trend...
Telephone polls are meaningless vehicles for polling agencies to generate meaningless statistics to sell to whoever's paying their bill.
In theory, I'm inclined to agree with you. In practice - acceptable levels of statistical error tend to be relative judgments. What is meaningless to you and I may have great meaning to Joe Sixpack, and probably often does.
The question becomes - how do we reconcile different relative judgments?
Please don't say bring in the lawyers.:/
Aside from potentially swaying people that are on the fence and whose minds are as maleable as chewed bubble gum, in my experience telephone polls aren't used as conclusive findings... but as rough indicators and estimates of the current state of whatever issue is being polled.
I've had similar experiences. I've also had quite different experiences. It's amazing the degree to which different people value things like these polls. It's even more amazing the decisions some people will make based on them.
There was indeed some incorrect terminology in there, but you still provided an excellent description of one of the biggest polling problems there is.
There are a few questions for the people who are going to use the data from the poll. The most basic is:
Does the polled population meet the criteria of who is to be polled?
Any time you see the criteria "random" near any geographic criteria such as "nationwide", you can bet your belt buckle that the polling agent is not meeting the criteria.
example:
It's a lot easier to get a sampling from a population of "people who walk down Elm street" than it is to get a sampling from a population of "people who live in France".
Now add in the need to make the selected samples "random", and try to reconcile that with the fact that the samples are human beings who may not cooperate with you. You've suddenly restricted your "random" sample to "a random sampling of those people who wish to participate".
That's the basic problem. It gets much more detailed and complex as you introduce additional factors. Poll buyer - beware.
"PIGSKIN PICK'EM, COMCAST SPORTSNET AND OTHER STATIONS---Ty Gaston hoststhis piece of crap show and Bobby Della Rocca, Jimmy Spats and MarkBradshaw are accomplices in this mugging of the viewers' sensibilities.Wait, there's more. Ads by Jack Price, Mr. Evil himself, run on theshow. You remember Price, don't you? HBO exposed him as the crookedesttout in the country a few years back on their investigative show "RealSports" and the U.S. government followed up last year when it bustedPrice (real name: Mark Megrouni) in connection with fraud and taxevasion surrounding Price's now-defunct offshore sportsbook, ParadiseCasino in Curacao. Price narrowly avoided jail by paying huge fines.Nice to see he's back in business. Not. Rating: F"
Educational:
- teaching people the consequences of handing out their email addresses. (OK, this being/., I should probably say "lecturing" instead of teaching.
Obviously, there are more solutions, but those few examples should illustrate what I'm getting at. I have yet to hear a proposed solution that doesn't fit in one or more of those categories.
Ideally, we'd just use an educational method. We know that the only reason that people spam is because they believe it is profitable to do so. They believe it's profitable to do so because they believe that people will respond to their spam. As much as I hate to think it, it's hard to believe they'd just continue to spam without some proof that these beliefs are accurate. The educational method would seek to do one or more of the following:
1. Educate users not to let their email addresses get in the hands of spammers. 2. Educate users about how the spammers get their email addresses. 3. Educate users that responding to spam (whether to buy, or to just tell the spammer off) is not a good idea. 4. Educate the spammer that... well, educating the spammer is probably not a worthwhile goal.
The problems you run into with this method are that:
1. It costs a lot of money to educate enough users such that it will not be rewarding for a spammer to continue to spam. 2. Some users (believe it or not) actually don't mind receiving spam. 3. Some users (believe it or not) actually *like* to receive (certain) spam, and purchase goods and services based on the spam. 4. Not all users are on the same end of the bell curve.
I don't know if the roadblocks allow us to pursue education as an option. My guess, after a few years of reflection, would be "no".
The latest fad in addressing spam seems to be economic solutions. Most often, this is in the form of either legislation with punitive results (See the $500/per unsolicited email stories), or ideas floated about taxing email, either publically (taxes) or privately (fees).
I call these fads because they are generally politically motivated or under-researched ideas. Legislation is fine and dandy, but the technical aspect of spam makes it very difficult to enforce. I am referring to header forging, spam-and-run tactics, identity falsification, sending from other countries, etc. The fact that the spammers have such amazing technical weaponry at their disposal makes legislation seem almost silly. Due to the sluggish nature of the legislative process, spammers will *always* be a step ahead, thanks to technology.
Eventually, of course, spammers will destroy themselves, thanks to this same technology. We will eventually reach a point where the technology exists for anyone to very easily spam everyone else, and the signal to noise ratio of SMTP traffic will approach 0 as a limit. At that point, email will be useless without filtering. But we don't want to go through this period before emerging on the other side of the rainbow. I am flabbergasted that Joe User isn't receiving far more spam these days than he is. If you had asked me a year ago, I would have said that I would not be surprised in March 2003 if Joe User averaged over 500 spam a day, instead of the more common two-digit numbers bandied about.
The other economic option of taxing or levying fees against email traffic falls victim to the same technology curve. It's just too hard to keep up. Even if it were, you then run into the labyrinth of *how* to implement such a solution, let alone enforce it. Should it be based strictly on the quantity of emails sent? Should the size of the email play a factor? Should people only have to pay past a certain threshold of mail sent? The questions go on and on.
The final category is technical solutions. End-user software, blacklists, DNS blocking lists, the 'block' button at hotmail.. This is where the vast majority of effort has been spent so far, and even with the rampant spamming that exists today, I think it's fair to say that a lot of these technical solutions have had a good effect. They've also had a lot of bad effect, in that there has not been a unified approach to resolving the problem, but at least people are addressing it, even if in a differentiated manner. These methods have a host of their own problems, as well - false positives (blocking non-spam), not catching everything, spam-and-run spammers, and so on. Any end-user based blocking device still leaves a ton of bandwidth consumed by every network involved, right up until the packets get dropped at the doorstep. Any non-end-user based device runs all the other risks.
So, what do we do?
I don't know.
Sorry, I'm not trying to cop out here, but I am trying to be honest. I don't know what the best solution is. Personally, I like the idea of whitelists (deny all unless explicitly permitted), wherein users don't receive email from anyone unless they already told their mail system that it's ok to receive mail from that address. Here's a walkthrough of my ideal end-user solution:
1. User implements whitelist, with set of "allowed" addresses/domains. 2. User receives email only from addresses on the whitelist. 3. If mail arrives and is not on the whitelist, it is bounced back to the sender, with a message from the user.
The way around false-positives (rejecting email you want - in this case, from senders not on your white list - let's say you handed out your email address to a new friend, or need to receive an invoice from a company) is to set up the bounce message with information indicating how the send can get on your whitelist. This could include an alternate email address, and agreement to a Terms & Conditions document (hells yes, send it right back at the companies!), or something as simple as a alphanumeric string to include in the subject line that would bypass the white list.
The alphanumeric string solution would look like this:
User sets up whitelist to deny all email unless either:
a. the sender's address/domain is in the whitelist.
b. the subject contains 'MYPASSWORD733'
c. bounce messages includes the password.
This prevents automated spamming (unique passwords per individual, in customized bounce messages), yet allows a sender to re-send their message immediately with the new subject to bypass the whitelist.
Can spammers get around it? Sure, if they read every single bounce message by hand. Or, if they get a program intelligent enough to understand and respond to the bounce message - but that's much harder than you think, if everyone customizes their bounce message differently. Worried about a spammer adding your email and whitelist password to a database and selling it? just change your whitelist password, and thier gathered data is useless. You never need to remember it, and it doesn't need to ever stay the same, because it's sent out in each bounced message.
Of course, this solution has problems of its own:
1. It greatly increases the amount of SMTP traffic. 2. It doesn't stop the spammers traffic from getting to the last mile, and consuming all the bandwidth in between.
That being the case, all I have to say is - bandwidth is cheap.;)
And to those of you that complain that/. is too U.S.-centric, I point out that the temperature references in the posting header are centigrade, not farenheit.
I'm not saying/. isn't U.S.-centric, of course.;)
I'm just pointing out that they aren't always.
And yes, I realize the article came from Australia.
Of course, they really should have said which scale (centigrade/farenheit/kelvin/etc) they are using in the submission itself, for those that don't know the numbers off the top of their head, but we'll take what we can get, I suppose.
Out of 20 or so auctions I've won on eBay, only once have I wanted to leave negative feedback. A guy quoted shipping of 18 dollars US, and in the end, the USPS shipping he used was only 8. I felt sort of angry that he'd ripped me for 10 dollars but in the end we just agred NOT to leave feedback for the auction, as the draft I sent him was (according to him) 'uncashable' and he ended up waiting an extra week for a different pay type to show up.
Was he quoting you just shipping, or shipping and handling? Usually it's both. Maybe he considered his handling worth $10?
I happen to agree with your point on this particular style issue, but I want to offer up this thought: The New York Times has a well-known Style Guide and, while I have no idea what it says about pluralizing acronyms, I am sure it says something. The writer and his/her editor are surely going to go by that, not a Web-based self-appointed guardian of grammar. Just because a lot of people contribute to a discussion, doesn't mean the discussion is authoritative (slashdot, anyone?).
My fellow Slashfriend, I am more than familiar with the concept of a Style Guide, having been employed at multiple professional publications.
While I must agree with you that I also have no idea what the NYT Style Guide happens to say in this instance, I *can* say that as an owner of Strunk & White's _Elements of Style_, the _Chicago Manual of Style_, and having written many times under Chicago, MLA, and APA guidelines, that I *seriously* doubt that the NYTSG differs on this issue from pretty much every Style Guide out there.
I agree with you that the NYTSG says something regarding this. I happen to think it probably agrees with every other style guide I've ever seen. This does not mean that the author or her editor followed it.
Much more importantly, one of the great strengths of the English language is its similarity to Perl: There's More Than One Way to Do It. Thankfully, we have no great temple of English usage, where Zen oracles tell we little people what the correct form is.
Considering the reach and clout of the New York Times, I think it's fair to say that their Style Guide can be taken as an authority... certainly at least as much as an Internet mailing list can.
Agreed. I just doubt seriously that she followed her Style Guide.
This year, several of the major music companies have said they plan to begin embedding copy-protection technologies on a sizable percentage of their CD's. DVD's are already protected by a digital wrapper that prevents them from being copied.
http://www.ucc.ie/acronyms/
From laymen, this is expected. From a journalist, who is supposed to understand basic grammar rules as part of the job, this is just sad. And in the New York Times, no less.
I can probably give you a few ideas as to how that cost is composed, on a departmental level, at least.:What is the origin of the cost of bandwidth?
To the seller or the buyer?
To the seller, assuming they are somewhere below the carrier grade level, their cost for the bandwidth itself is whatever they are paying the carrier(s) that they are renting their own bandwidth from. Of course, then you have to add in all the costs that come with doing something useful with that bandwidth - equipment, employees, et cetra.
To the buyer..it depends on the selling organization. In some places, Marketing gets to determine the cost, based on the current market value. This often leads to doom because hey, if they knew how to do math, they probably wouldn't have ended up in Marketing where everyone sits around and looks at shiny things. In other organizations, Engineering and Provisioning (or other Operational groups) determine the actual cost to the company, then they let either Sales or Marketing tack on a little more for overhead/profit. Depends on which departments in a company have power.
Yes, I realize that seems ludicrous, but that's generally how it works. People are people, and all that. I worked at a company where I gradually watched a shift in the balance of pricing power over a few years from Marketing/Sales to Engineering/Ops, and let me tell you, it's a fascinating thing to watch.
After 9/11, many tech companies saw opportunities for both patriotism and profit. Oracle offered to donate the software to create a federal identity database.
Well, I suppose it's nice to know that the handbasket we're going to hell in is at least free.
Slashdot Mirror
Anyone have any insights into this situation? Change your resume so that the point of contact you list for the company that gives you a bad reference is one of your previous supervisors that gave you good references. That person may no longer work there, but your prospective employer would probably value the opinion of your ex-supervisor more than someone who just happens to work there now.
I empathize with you, but it's the nature of our increasingly litigious society that is causing things like this, unfortunately. If only we could figure out a way to reverse that trend...
I don't see the problem with your numbers.
If you have 1000 students, and 10% of them vote, 100 students voted and 900 did not.
Your pollsters surveyed X% of the 1000 students. 30% of those surveyed indicated that they voted.
That could mean they surveyed 100 students, and 30 of those 100 students voted, while 70 of them did not.
The population of who took the survey does not necessarily correspond with the population of your student body as a whole.
Telephone polls are meaningless vehicles for polling agencies to generate meaningless statistics to sell to whoever's paying their bill.
:/
... but as rough indicators and estimates of the current state of whatever issue is being polled.
In theory, I'm inclined to agree with you. In practice - acceptable levels of statistical error tend to be relative judgments. What is meaningless to you and I may have great meaning to Joe Sixpack, and probably often does.
The question becomes - how do we reconcile different relative judgments?
Please don't say bring in the lawyers.
Aside from potentially swaying people that are on the fence and whose minds are as maleable as chewed bubble gum, in my experience telephone polls aren't used as conclusive findings
I've had similar experiences. I've also had quite different experiences. It's amazing the degree to which different people value things like these polls. It's even more amazing the decisions some people will make based on them.
There was indeed some incorrect terminology in there, but you still provided an excellent description of one of the biggest polling problems there is.
There are a few questions for the people who are going to use the data from the poll. The most basic is:
Does the polled population meet the criteria of who is to be polled?
Any time you see the criteria "random" near any geographic criteria such as "nationwide", you can bet your belt buckle that the polling agent is not meeting the criteria.
example:
It's a lot easier to get a sampling from a population of "people who walk down Elm street" than it is to get a sampling from a population of "people who live in France".
Now add in the need to make the selected samples "random", and try to reconcile that with the fact that the samples are human beings who may not cooperate with you. You've suddenly restricted your "random" sample to "a random sampling of those people who wish to participate".
That's the basic problem. It gets much more detailed and complex as you introduce additional factors. Poll buyer - beware.
This already occurs on many toll roads, including the NJ turnpike. They just compare timestamps right now.
more about your buddy Jack Price:
http://pickstoclick.com/paradise.htm
http://ww
http://www.bri
http://www.bettorsworld.com/web/bstuff/raj/11-1
"PIGSKIN PICK'EM, COMCAST SPORTSNET AND OTHER STATIONS---Ty Gaston hoststhis piece of crap show and Bobby Della Rocca, Jimmy Spats and MarkBradshaw are accomplices in this mugging of the viewers' sensibilities.Wait, there's more. Ads by Jack Price, Mr. Evil himself, run on theshow. You remember Price, don't you? HBO exposed him as the crookedesttout in the country a few years back on their investigative show "RealSports" and the U.S. government followed up last year when it bustedPrice (real name: Mark Megrouni) in connection with fraud and taxevasion surrounding Price's now-defunct offshore sportsbook, ParadiseCasino in Curacao. Price narrowly avoided jail by paying huge fines.Nice to see he's back in business. Not. Rating: F"
happy hunting
This post is insightful and mature. I wish we could see more of a similar calibre here on slashdot.
No, it wasn't /.ed after 4 posts...
http://www.thehonestthief.com/ is the correct URL.
[Anti-rant Disclaimer: This post is knowingly U.S.-centric in its discussion of legislation proposals and user attitudes, just an FYI]
/., I should probably say "lecturing" instead of teaching.
... well, educating the spammer is probably not a worthwhile goal.
;)
I think it's important to address the potential solutions that are being discussed from a slightly higher level than is being done.
Personally, I tend to categorize the solutions I've heard into one of three concepts. Here they are, with a few examples:
Economic:
- fine spammers
- implement a 'pay for email' system
- legislation (usually economically punitive)
Technical:
- spam filters
- blackholing ISPs/open relays/DNS blocks
Educational:
- teaching people the consequences of handing out their email addresses. (OK, this being
Obviously, there are more solutions, but those few examples should illustrate what I'm getting at. I have yet to hear a proposed solution that doesn't fit in one or more of those categories.
The problems with these categories tend to be:
Economic - restriction of freedoms
Technical - cost
Educational - cost
Ideally, we'd just use an educational method. We know that the only reason that people spam is because they believe it is profitable to do so. They believe it's profitable to do so because they believe that people will respond to their spam. As much as I hate to think it, it's hard to believe they'd just continue to spam without some proof that these beliefs are accurate. The educational method would seek to do one or more of the following:
1. Educate users not to let their email addresses get in the hands of spammers.
2. Educate users about how the spammers get their email addresses.
3. Educate users that responding to spam (whether to buy, or to just tell the spammer off) is not a good idea.
4. Educate the spammer that
The problems you run into with this method are that:
1. It costs a lot of money to educate enough users such that it will not be rewarding for a spammer to continue to spam.
2. Some users (believe it or not) actually don't mind receiving spam.
3. Some users (believe it or not) actually *like* to receive (certain) spam, and purchase goods and services based on the spam.
4. Not all users are on the same end of the bell curve.
I don't know if the roadblocks allow us to pursue education as an option. My guess, after a few years of reflection, would be "no".
The latest fad in addressing spam seems to be economic solutions. Most often, this is in the form of either legislation with punitive results (See the $500/per unsolicited email stories), or ideas floated about taxing email, either publically (taxes) or privately (fees).
I call these fads because they are generally politically motivated or under-researched ideas. Legislation is fine and dandy, but the technical aspect of spam makes it very difficult to enforce. I am referring to header forging, spam-and-run tactics, identity falsification, sending from other countries, etc. The fact that the spammers have such amazing technical weaponry at their disposal makes legislation seem almost silly. Due to the sluggish nature of the legislative process, spammers will *always* be a step ahead, thanks to technology.
Eventually, of course, spammers will destroy themselves, thanks to this same technology. We will eventually reach a point where the technology exists for anyone to very easily spam everyone else, and the signal to noise ratio of SMTP traffic will approach 0 as a limit. At that point, email will be useless without filtering. But we don't want to go through this period before emerging on the other side of the rainbow. I am flabbergasted that Joe User isn't receiving far more spam these days than he is. If you had asked me a year ago, I would have said that I would not be surprised in March 2003 if Joe User averaged over 500 spam a day, instead of the more common two-digit numbers bandied about.
The other economic option of taxing or levying fees against email traffic falls victim to the same technology curve. It's just too hard to keep up. Even if it were, you then run into the labyrinth of *how* to implement such a solution, let alone enforce it. Should it be based strictly on the quantity of emails sent? Should the size of the email play a factor? Should people only have to pay past a certain threshold of mail sent? The questions go on and on.
The final category is technical solutions. End-user software, blacklists, DNS blocking lists, the 'block' button at hotmail.. This is where the vast majority of effort has been spent so far, and even with the rampant spamming that exists today, I think it's fair to say that a lot of these technical solutions have had a good effect. They've also had a lot of bad effect, in that there has not been a unified approach to resolving the problem, but at least people are addressing it, even if in a differentiated manner. These methods have a host of their own problems, as well - false positives (blocking non-spam), not catching everything, spam-and-run spammers, and so on. Any end-user based blocking device still leaves a ton of bandwidth consumed by every network involved, right up until the packets get dropped at the doorstep. Any non-end-user based device runs all the other risks.
So, what do we do?
I don't know.
Sorry, I'm not trying to cop out here, but I am trying to be honest. I don't know what the best solution is. Personally, I like the idea of whitelists (deny all unless explicitly permitted), wherein users don't receive email from anyone unless they already told their mail system that it's ok to receive mail from that address. Here's a walkthrough of my ideal end-user solution:
1. User implements whitelist, with set of "allowed" addresses/domains.
2. User receives email only from addresses on the whitelist.
3. If mail arrives and is not on the whitelist, it is bounced back to the sender, with a message from the user.
The way around false-positives (rejecting email you want - in this case, from senders not on your white list - let's say you handed out your email address to a new friend, or need to receive an invoice from a company) is to set up the bounce message with information indicating how the send can get on your whitelist. This could include an alternate email address, and agreement to a Terms & Conditions document (hells yes, send it right back at the companies!), or something as simple as a alphanumeric string to include in the subject line that would bypass the white list.
The alphanumeric string solution would look like this:
User sets up whitelist to deny all email unless either:
a. the sender's address/domain is in the whitelist.
b. the subject contains 'MYPASSWORD733'
c. bounce messages includes the password.
This prevents automated spamming (unique passwords per individual, in customized bounce messages), yet allows a sender to re-send their message immediately with the new subject to bypass the whitelist.
Can spammers get around it? Sure, if they read every single bounce message by hand. Or, if they get a program intelligent enough to understand and respond to the bounce message - but that's much harder than you think, if everyone customizes their bounce message differently. Worried about a spammer adding your email and whitelist password to a database and selling it? just change your whitelist password, and thier gathered data is useless. You never need to remember it, and it doesn't need to ever stay the same, because it's sent out in each bounced message.
Of course, this solution has problems of its own:
1. It greatly increases the amount of SMTP traffic.
2. It doesn't stop the spammers traffic from getting to the last mile, and consuming all the bandwidth in between.
That being the case, all I have to say is - bandwidth is cheap.
Thoughtful replies encouraged..
quikgrit
And to those of you that complain that /. is too U.S.-centric, I point out that the temperature references in the posting header are centigrade, not farenheit.
/. isn't U.S.-centric, of course. ;)
I'm not saying
I'm just pointing out that they aren't always.
And yes, I realize the article came from Australia.
Of course, they really should have said which scale (centigrade/farenheit/kelvin/etc) they are using in the submission itself, for those that don't know the numbers off the top of their head, but we'll take what we can get, I suppose.
for reference -
Absolute Zero temperatures:
Farenheit: -459.67
Centigrade: -273.15
Kelvin: 0
base page for California State Bar lookups:
2 19C.pgm?13432 8D
T 219C.pgm?13432 8S
http://calsb.org/mm/sbmbrshp.htm
searching for a Robert Grace only returns one name:
http://www.calsb.org/cgi-bin/NT201C?134328
Member# 134328
Robert L. Grace Jr is an ACTIVE Member
Only ACTIVE members may practice law in California
5533 Garth Ave
Los Angeles, CA 90056
Phone: (213)974-3562
FAX:
E-Mail:
Admitted in California on June 14, 1988
Undergraduate: Univ of California at Los Angeles; Los Angeles CA
School of Law: Loyola Law School; Los Angeles CA
(This person *does* show up as the only Robert Grace that lives in Los Angeles and is a member of the California State Bar)
No Public Record of Discipline:
http://www.calsb.org:8080/cgi-bin/NT
No further information:
http://www.calsb.org:8080/cgi-bin/N
--
Could it be?
So said gilroy:
... certainly at least as much as an Internet mailing list can.
I happen to agree with your point on this particular style issue, but I want to offer up this thought: The New York Times has a well-known Style Guide and, while I have no idea what it says about pluralizing acronyms, I am sure it says something. The writer and his/her editor are surely going to go by that, not a Web-based self-appointed guardian of grammar. Just because a lot of people contribute to a discussion, doesn't mean the discussion is authoritative (slashdot, anyone?).
My fellow Slashfriend, I am more than familiar with the concept of a Style Guide, having been employed at multiple professional publications.
While I must agree with you that I also have no idea what the NYT Style Guide happens to say in this instance, I *can* say that as an owner of Strunk & White's _Elements of Style_, the _Chicago Manual of Style_, and having written many times under Chicago, MLA, and APA guidelines, that I *seriously* doubt that the NYTSG differs on this issue from pretty much every Style Guide out there.
I agree with you that the NYTSG says something regarding this. I happen to think it probably agrees with every other style guide I've ever seen. This does not mean that the author or her editor followed it.
Much more importantly, one of the great strengths of the English language is its similarity to Perl: There's More Than One Way to Do It. Thankfully, we have no great temple of English usage, where Zen oracles tell we little people what the correct form is.
Indeed, I suppose that there is more than one way to do it.
Considering the reach and clout of the New York Times, I think it's fair to say that their Style Guide can be taken as an authority
Agreed. I just doubt seriously that she followed her Style Guide.
cheers!
This year, several of the major music companies have said they plan to begin embedding copy-protection technologies on a sizable percentage of their CD's. DVD's are already protected by a digital wrapper that prevents them from being copied.
http://www.ucc.ie/acronyms/
From laymen, this is expected. From a journalist, who is supposed to understand basic grammar rules as part of the job, this is just sad. And in the New York Times, no less.
They make you *register* for this?!
I can probably give you a few ideas as to how that cost is composed, on a departmental level, at least. :What is the origin of the cost of bandwidth?
To the seller or the buyer?
To the seller, assuming they are somewhere below the carrier grade level, their cost for the bandwidth itself is whatever they are paying the carrier(s) that they are renting their own bandwidth from. Of course, then you have to add in all the costs that come with doing something useful with that bandwidth - equipment, employees, et cetra.
To the buyer..it depends on the selling organization. In some places, Marketing gets to determine the cost, based on the current market value. This often leads to doom because hey, if they knew how to do math, they probably wouldn't have ended up in Marketing where everyone sits around and looks at shiny things. In other organizations, Engineering and Provisioning (or other Operational groups) determine the actual cost to the company, then they let either Sales or Marketing tack on a little more for overhead/profit. Depends on which departments in a company have power.
Yes, I realize that seems ludicrous, but that's generally how it works. People are people, and all that. I worked at a company where I gradually watched a shift in the balance of pricing power over a few years from Marketing/Sales to Engineering/Ops, and let me tell you, it's a fascinating thing to watch.
After 9/11, many tech companies saw opportunities for both patriotism and profit. Oracle offered to donate the software to create a federal identity database.
Well, I suppose it's nice to know that the handbasket we're going to hell in is at least free.