I don't know if you're a grammar nazi, maybe terminology nazi? Too much of a mouthful. Anyways, you are correct, burn != rip. Rip is so much funner to say though.../toungue in cheek
If they let me rip the thing to DVD, then we can talk. Even better would be able to move the file from one machine to another for playing. Of course, iTunes doesn't let you do that easily, but it is possible. I think if they do it right, then I'd consider the $9.99 price because that's what I buy most of my DVD's at now. The only difference is that it's a hard copy that I can kind of illegally without conscience rip when I want to. However, I bet the best they'll let you rip to is HD-DVD or BluRay because the copy protection can be enforced better.
The best online distribution so far is Steam (ducks). I was really impressed when I could install it both on my desktop and my laptop with the same username/password and it just updated both properly. I can install as many copies of HL2 as I want, but I can only play one at once. That's totally fine by me. As long as they know what I own and make it available to me whenever I want, I'm willing to put up with their system. AFAIK, iTunes doesn't give you your music back if you buy the songs and lose the original copy.
Not sure myself, but something tells me that a blue Blu-Ray container is a no-brainer. Then again, I'm not one of those "creative" people in marketing who might think that a Red Blu-Ray container is a true example of their "creativeness."
Way for you and your moderators to not read the article or the link to the flikr images. Quote:
The spots don't wash off, I've only had the MacBook for two weeks. Genius at Apple Store told me to call Apple about it, as he's never seen anything like it. My iBook didn't discolor in the 3 years I had it -- can't be my hands. I don't smoke, don't use latex, etc. And for those who worry about my hygiene habits, thanks. I wash my hands.
What's amazing is that you have about 10 responses jumping to the same conclusion. Oh well, I guess that's what we've come to expect on Slashdot.
No one has ever bought a mac from me, just because it was pretty.
You must be selling Mac SE's then. If you haven't noticed, the entire purpose of Mac is to sell pretty and friendly computers at an expensive price. Yes, they work well and are very good computers, but I very much doubt when your customer's "recognize what's up when shown the Apple option" that the first thing that runs through their mind is "How efficiently I can type my Legal Documents now!" No, the first thing most likely is, "This will look really nice on my Ikea desk."
I think the line is slowly blurring between devices like the DS and PSP and a PDA. Sure, on a PDA you can do word processing and email, and a PSP/DS are more designed for games (there are games for a PDA, but most people do not buy a PDA to solely play games) and you can consider these specializations of the market. In time, I think the products will merge or become more modular, especially once we see what happens with Origami in the near future. You can consider each firmware upgrade of the PSP adding apps and/or functionality to the device, just like one would install an application for a PDA or Origami.
Concentrate on one thing and--for the love of the game--get it right!
I know I'm going to get flamed for this, but I have to disagree. I love my PSP. I can surf the web for downloads, watching movies (UMD and ripped DVD's), listening to streaming audio, listening to my MP3's at work, and even playing a game occasionally. It's the only portable device I own other than my cell phone and I think it works great. It satisfies my needs perfectly. The wireless gaming is especially addictive, and I'm really getting hooked by Force Commander's play-by-email because I can keep the game going while satisfying my wife's nagging requests. As for media centers, I realize the niceness of a receiver to organize your devices, but I really yearn to take all of my machines and consolidate them into one. Do I really need 6 boxes sitting next to my television? Cable, DVR, DVD, VCR, Xbox/PS3/Wii/whatever, and then the receiver, plus speakers and the television? How large does my media cabinet have to be?
3)The thing I find strange is that if anything, tiered pricing, by passing on costs to distributors, could ultimately benefit consumers by lowering subscription costs. Tiered pricing could increase flexibility. I really am not sure. But that should be for private industry to decide.
That by far is the single most stupidest thing I've ever read. Yeah, it will pass on the cost to distributors who will just raise their prices. It might save the ISP money, but why would they lower their subscription price? Simple microeconomics says that if someone is willing to pay a certain price, it's possible that you can raise that price and they might still pay. Why would Verizon/Time Warner/SBC/Comcast lower their price to lower their profits? Instead, they'll keep the costs the same (because we're already paying it) and reap more money from us. Content providers, OTOH, will increase their prices to compensate for the charges from the ISP (who now will be making more money from the consumer and the provider), meaning the average consumer will be paying more for the content, not less.
You're right on the price. The $500 price is definitely going to keep me away for at least 6 months to a year. Of course, I'm not buying an xbox 360 yet so it's not like either camp is really getting me. Neither has shown me that they have the games that I want to play for either price ($400 is a lot of money too).
As for the 3 DVDs, I think that you could easily get there. People scoffed at the CDROM when it was first available and they'll scoff now too. If you give the developers the space, they'll use it. Super hi-res textures, extreme quality music and soundtracks, larger levels, HD movies, it can all be combined for the extra space.
As for hubris on the part of Sony, how else do you respond to that? Deny it? I think there's no right way to answer that question. They can definitely back up their response with numbers. How profitable was Microsoft's Xbox division? Oh that's right, it wasn't. And obviously Sony and Microsoft are going ot just ignore Nintendo, which wasn't really a player with the Gamecube anyways. As for the future, only time will tell.
I've met FIERCE resistance in the past from accounts trying to reform their spreadsheet ways.
Well, since they've been using these apps for more than 20 years and they resemble a balance sheet which is to accountants as computers are to software developers, it seems logical they wouldn't want to leave the spreadsheet behind. However, having used excel to do a little bit of change management tracking this year, I think it's safe to say that MS Sharepoint has versioning built-in to its interface, and you can even save from Excel and have the document update on the web. The result is that the users can continue to use their spreadsheets without even having to change their habits. I think it's a great solution, even though sharepoint is a bit overkill for just this one application. But hey, if your company has spare cash and needs a solution, this is the most seamless I've seen so far.
I was surprised the first time the "newer" PC Gamer came out at about 25% the previous size. I don't agree with you that hte quality has gone down, however. I still enjoy reading the reviews (I enjoy them more than IGN or Gamespot) and they tend to scoop some games better than what's online. The columnists are touch and go, with Desslock being one of the better ones, and I think their mod coverage is pretty comprehensive too. The new organization of the magazine is a bit confusing, however. I can never tell whether I'm reading a review or a preview of some games.
For those that don't read it, they recently moved to placing games into sections according to genre. Previously, they had the columnists, previews, and reviews all separate regardless of genre. Now you get the review, preview, and columnist for RPG all next to each other, and so forth.
If anything, I think this definitely is still a problem in the US particularly with females. There are increasing numbers of women who play games but I think the stereotype and the most marketed to group is definitely males by far. If the Wii can garner a female market, particularly teenage girls, then it will definitely be breaking barriers. While blogging and ipods have brought more women to the "geek" hobbies more than ever, I still think that until teenage girls adapt to gaming in large numbers, it'll still have a stigmatism attached to it. The Wii is definitely a step in the right direction, especially the image, but I don't think we'll conquer this in one fell swoop. It's going to take several generations of consoles to get there.
Some interesting screenshots, although I just skipped over the KDE ones because I've seen KDE before. It's nice to see a smooth graphical installation. Some purists always cry for text prompts, but I like the ease of a GUI. Every time I install gentoo I have to have a second machine running beside me to remind me of the steps to take in installation (I refuse to pay for inkjet cartridges, fill them on my own, or pay for a laserjet printer). Maybe it's me, but I have a horrible memory for that kind of stuff. Kuduos to PC-BSD if their installation is as smooth as it is good looking. If there's a graphical package manager and kernel manager then that's just bonus. I never liked the Linux GTK frontend (I still use make menuconfig after make oldconfig) and most of the portage frontends are too cluttered to be useful.
Actually, here is the direct quote from the article:
Forgent can respond, but it seems they'll have some explaining to do, because PubPat's Executive Director, Dan Ravicher, says that the submitters knew about the prior art but failed to tell the USPTO about it.
It's not a direct quote of Dan Ravicher, meaning that you can't say those are the exact words he said. Which is why I said PJ and not Dan Ravicher. Instead, it's PJ's summary of what he said. So I'm summarizing PJ's summary of Dan Ravicher. Got it?
Ironically enough, some of the SOC site is unreadable with IE 6. Anyone else notice when you click an application the site comes up with all the projects left justified underneath the links? Slashdot does that sometimes as well but usually a refresh helps it out. Here, it doesn't matter. Too bad my company doesn't have firefox readily available.
Very true. Developers have their own vision of what the game will be and until the game is produced, I for one don't think they should compromise that, no matter what a beta tester might say. Beta testers are to find bugs and usability problems. They are not to dictate story line or game mechanics. Obviously they can comment all they want, but in the end it's up to the designers to listen. Sometimes these comments make sense, other times it's just crazy. I think a wiser thing would be to have some kind of peer review. If you can have other developers try out a game they'll probably give you more constructive feedback because they speak your language and understand what you're doing (hopefully). However, due to the nature of the business it's obvious that this can't happen for every game. It barely happens for some games.
In the end, I say stay true to the story, release the game, and fix the interface and mechanics for the paying customers, not the idiot beta testers.
I realize you're "just trying to explain what they're doing," but let's review that article once again. As your brother quotes from the article:
If true, such a move would be a massive boost for publishers and developers which do not profit from the lucrative and damaging retail trade in used games. In fact, many publishers are furious that they have to spend support money on consumers who have not actually contributed a dime to the company's coffers.
This might be a motivation to Sony. However, to those developers and publishers I say, "Welcome to capitalism." You don't see Krupps or Coffeemate complaining when someone sells a used coffee pot on Ebay do you? It's the same thing. These businesses have no logical leg to stand on here. Software is a product, plain and simple. Obviously I'm bordering on taking this to a patent law / commoditization of software discussion, so I'm going to stop there. But there is no way you can go into business selling a product and not expect secondary sales to occur.
The next illogical step in this argument for Sony, Activision, EA, or whomever is a publicly owned company would be to attempt to get the NYSE and NASDAQ to ban trading their shares on the stock market unless their public offerrings from the company itself because the companies won't benefit from the cash trading hands. Give me a break.
In my mind, the problem here is why companies that have telecommuting employees insist on keeping them based, on paper, in NYC. If the guy works form his house in Jersey, put that down as his work location. If he works from the North Pole, put that down on his W-2. I've done remote-work jobs, and I've never used the location I'm calling-in to as my work location: I use whatever piece of ground I'm sitting on while I'm doing the work.
Here's an interesting tidbit about New Jersey and New York income taxes. Last year, my fiance worked in New Jersey for 2 months, January and February. She then moved to Albany where she worked the remainder of the year for a different employer. She cut all ties to New Jersey once she moved, so none of her work was done there. Last month when she filed her income taxes, lo and behold New Jersey taxes people for their entire annual income, regardless of whether you earned it all in New Jersey or not. She basically had to pay income tax twice. New York, on the other hand, only taxed her for her New York income. Personally, I think that the New Jersey tax is worse than the New York telecommuter since she didn't feasibly benefit New Jersey's economy in any way after she moved. You could possibly make an argument that a telecommuter to a New York location does effect the economy there because you're conducting business there.
If you're a stock trader who lives in Jersey (a few do), and you telecommute to your desk in Manhattan to make a trade on the NYSE, isn't that affecting New York's (and some could argue the global) economy?
Actually even better, if you read the contest rules it's not $100k at all. They're giving out a total of $100k. Each contest winner wins $15k. Second place gets $5k. For three months of development at maximum, it's not worth your time. In fact, unless you're doing this in about one man-month, you'd probably be losing money compared to what you'd earn in wages. However, most people who do work on this will be doing it on the side, so this is technically extra money in the bank. Still, unless you have a great idea for a project for this that won't take much time, it's probably not worth the effort to try.
Not that I have to rationalize my actions to your condescending tone, but I had been using a modified version of Nucleus. I modified it myself to fit my own needs for account creation and management, and comment creation. I also modified it to add a few other features such as a slashdot like poll for fun and also a login mechanism that redirected you to my main url to login and then back to hte page you were browsing to give you the ability to fill out a small form on the current page and click a button and you'd be immediately logged in. The problem was that my digital certificate was for my www domain and I had a few blogs running on other domains so I needed to redirect to the first domain, create a cookie with the proper login info, and then redirect you back to the page you were looking at. All of this required a few hours of coding and testing. Which means to upgrade I'd have to go back through all the code again and figure out what I modified and all that. The reason was that between the version that I used and the next version Nucleus went through a code overhaul that changed quite a bit of stuff internally. It should be noted of course that the code overhaul was done thanks mostly to the Nucleus community complaining that it didn't have enough support against comment spam, which at the time of my site shutdown was just reaching fever pitch. I helped contribute some ideas that were for the most part rejected, but at least stimultated discussion.
Anyways, it got away from me and I had other pressing interests such as school, work, and my Master's Thesis, plus being married didn't help much either. Looking at your "Yahoo hosted" account and the blog that you link to there, it's obvious you were not as successful at getting rid of spam as you said you were.
What about a solution like the SETI project? A nice graphical screensaver that uses spare processor cycles to send email spam to known spammers. It could even display something funny like a graph showing how much harassment you're causing.
However, I don't think any kind of attack spam with spam solution is worth it. We need to either redesign the protocol, marginalize the spammers, or make it very illegal and put them in jail. Sure, you might argue that direct marketing through email really isn't illegal (junk snail mail sure isn't), but I think if you don't respect the don't spam lists and requests to stop, or even go so far as to launch a DOS attack as TFA describes, then you definitely belong behind bars or without access to a computer.
I noticed that your user page doesn't have any submitted stories that made the front page. I also comment fairly regularly and have had three submissions accepted. After my first one, I started receiving 20-30 phishing emails a day in my gmail inbox, and about 5 legitimate emails. That's why I've stopped posting any kind of email whatsoever to this site. As it is, my URL currently goes nowhere as well because shortly after I started using that instead I got hit with comment spam and lacking the time to install a solution like captcha images, I decided to just take the server down instead. This is for a site that got at most 20 people a day who were mostly my friends. We need some kind of international solution to stop these people and the harm they're doing.
Slashdot Mirror
I don't know if you're a grammar nazi, maybe terminology nazi? Too much of a mouthful. Anyways, you are correct, burn != rip. Rip is so much funner to say though... /toungue in cheek
If they let me rip the thing to DVD, then we can talk. Even better would be able to move the file from one machine to another for playing. Of course, iTunes doesn't let you do that easily, but it is possible. I think if they do it right, then I'd consider the $9.99 price because that's what I buy most of my DVD's at now. The only difference is that it's a hard copy that I can kind of illegally without conscience rip when I want to. However, I bet the best they'll let you rip to is HD-DVD or BluRay because the copy protection can be enforced better.
The best online distribution so far is Steam (ducks). I was really impressed when I could install it both on my desktop and my laptop with the same username/password and it just updated both properly. I can install as many copies of HL2 as I want, but I can only play one at once. That's totally fine by me. As long as they know what I own and make it available to me whenever I want, I'm willing to put up with their system. AFAIK, iTunes doesn't give you your music back if you buy the songs and lose the original copy.
Not sure myself, but something tells me that a blue Blu-Ray container is a no-brainer. Then again, I'm not one of those "creative" people in marketing who might think that a Red Blu-Ray container is a true example of their "creativeness."
Way for you and your moderators to not read the article or the link to the flikr images. Quote:
The spots don't wash off, I've only had the MacBook for two weeks. Genius at Apple Store told me to call Apple about it, as he's never seen anything like it. My iBook didn't discolor in the 3 years I had it -- can't be my hands. I don't smoke, don't use latex, etc. And for those who worry about my hygiene habits, thanks. I wash my hands.
What's amazing is that you have about 10 responses jumping to the same conclusion. Oh well, I guess that's what we've come to expect on Slashdot.
No one has ever bought a mac from me, just because it was pretty.
You must be selling Mac SE's then. If you haven't noticed, the entire purpose of Mac is to sell pretty and friendly computers at an expensive price. Yes, they work well and are very good computers, but I very much doubt when your customer's "recognize what's up when shown the Apple option" that the first thing that runs through their mind is "How efficiently I can type my Legal Documents now!" No, the first thing most likely is, "This will look really nice on my Ikea desk."
I think the line is slowly blurring between devices like the DS and PSP and a PDA. Sure, on a PDA you can do word processing and email, and a PSP/DS are more designed for games (there are games for a PDA, but most people do not buy a PDA to solely play games) and you can consider these specializations of the market. In time, I think the products will merge or become more modular, especially once we see what happens with Origami in the near future. You can consider each firmware upgrade of the PSP adding apps and/or functionality to the device, just like one would install an application for a PDA or Origami.
Concentrate on one thing and--for the love of the game--get it right!
I know I'm going to get flamed for this, but I have to disagree. I love my PSP. I can surf the web for downloads, watching movies (UMD and ripped DVD's), listening to streaming audio, listening to my MP3's at work, and even playing a game occasionally. It's the only portable device I own other than my cell phone and I think it works great. It satisfies my needs perfectly. The wireless gaming is especially addictive, and I'm really getting hooked by Force Commander's play-by-email because I can keep the game going while satisfying my wife's nagging requests. As for media centers, I realize the niceness of a receiver to organize your devices, but I really yearn to take all of my machines and consolidate them into one. Do I really need 6 boxes sitting next to my television? Cable, DVR, DVD, VCR, Xbox/PS3/Wii/whatever, and then the receiver, plus speakers and the television? How large does my media cabinet have to be?
3)The thing I find strange is that if anything, tiered pricing, by passing on costs to distributors, could ultimately benefit consumers by lowering subscription costs. Tiered pricing could increase flexibility. I really am not sure. But that should be for private industry to decide.
That by far is the single most stupidest thing I've ever read. Yeah, it will pass on the cost to distributors who will just raise their prices. It might save the ISP money, but why would they lower their subscription price? Simple microeconomics says that if someone is willing to pay a certain price, it's possible that you can raise that price and they might still pay. Why would Verizon/Time Warner/SBC/Comcast lower their price to lower their profits? Instead, they'll keep the costs the same (because we're already paying it) and reap more money from us. Content providers, OTOH, will increase their prices to compensate for the charges from the ISP (who now will be making more money from the consumer and the provider), meaning the average consumer will be paying more for the content, not less.
You're right on the price. The $500 price is definitely going to keep me away for at least 6 months to a year. Of course, I'm not buying an xbox 360 yet so it's not like either camp is really getting me. Neither has shown me that they have the games that I want to play for either price ($400 is a lot of money too).
As for the 3 DVDs, I think that you could easily get there. People scoffed at the CDROM when it was first available and they'll scoff now too. If you give the developers the space, they'll use it. Super hi-res textures, extreme quality music and soundtracks, larger levels, HD movies, it can all be combined for the extra space.
As for hubris on the part of Sony, how else do you respond to that? Deny it? I think there's no right way to answer that question. They can definitely back up their response with numbers. How profitable was Microsoft's Xbox division? Oh that's right, it wasn't. And obviously Sony and Microsoft are going ot just ignore Nintendo, which wasn't really a player with the Gamecube anyways. As for the future, only time will tell.
I've met FIERCE resistance in the past from accounts trying to reform their spreadsheet ways.
Well, since they've been using these apps for more than 20 years and they resemble a balance sheet which is to accountants as computers are to software developers, it seems logical they wouldn't want to leave the spreadsheet behind. However, having used excel to do a little bit of change management tracking this year, I think it's safe to say that MS Sharepoint has versioning built-in to its interface, and you can even save from Excel and have the document update on the web. The result is that the users can continue to use their spreadsheets without even having to change their habits. I think it's a great solution, even though sharepoint is a bit overkill for just this one application. But hey, if your company has spare cash and needs a solution, this is the most seamless I've seen so far.
I was surprised the first time the "newer" PC Gamer came out at about 25% the previous size. I don't agree with you that hte quality has gone down, however. I still enjoy reading the reviews (I enjoy them more than IGN or Gamespot) and they tend to scoop some games better than what's online. The columnists are touch and go, with Desslock being one of the better ones, and I think their mod coverage is pretty comprehensive too. The new organization of the magazine is a bit confusing, however. I can never tell whether I'm reading a review or a preview of some games.
For those that don't read it, they recently moved to placing games into sections according to genre. Previously, they had the columnists, previews, and reviews all separate regardless of genre. Now you get the review, preview, and columnist for RPG all next to each other, and so forth.
If anything, I think this definitely is still a problem in the US particularly with females. There are increasing numbers of women who play games but I think the stereotype and the most marketed to group is definitely males by far. If the Wii can garner a female market, particularly teenage girls, then it will definitely be breaking barriers. While blogging and ipods have brought more women to the "geek" hobbies more than ever, I still think that until teenage girls adapt to gaming in large numbers, it'll still have a stigmatism attached to it. The Wii is definitely a step in the right direction, especially the image, but I don't think we'll conquer this in one fell swoop. It's going to take several generations of consoles to get there.
This being slashdot, I knew someone would just say "why don't you print the instructions out."
Some interesting screenshots, although I just skipped over the KDE ones because I've seen KDE before. It's nice to see a smooth graphical installation. Some purists always cry for text prompts, but I like the ease of a GUI. Every time I install gentoo I have to have a second machine running beside me to remind me of the steps to take in installation (I refuse to pay for inkjet cartridges, fill them on my own, or pay for a laserjet printer). Maybe it's me, but I have a horrible memory for that kind of stuff. Kuduos to PC-BSD if their installation is as smooth as it is good looking. If there's a graphical package manager and kernel manager then that's just bonus. I never liked the Linux GTK frontend (I still use make menuconfig after make oldconfig) and most of the portage frontends are too cluttered to be useful.
Actually, here is the direct quote from the article:
Forgent can respond, but it seems they'll have some explaining to do, because PubPat's Executive Director, Dan Ravicher, says that the submitters knew about the prior art but failed to tell the USPTO about it.
It's not a direct quote of Dan Ravicher, meaning that you can't say those are the exact words he said. Which is why I said PJ and not Dan Ravicher. Instead, it's PJ's summary of what he said. So I'm summarizing PJ's summary of Dan Ravicher. Got it?
so it's Forgent not Fogent. I managed to do it in the title and the summary. [pats self on back]
Ironically enough, some of the SOC site is unreadable with IE 6. Anyone else notice when you click an application the site comes up with all the projects left justified underneath the links? Slashdot does that sometimes as well but usually a refresh helps it out. Here, it doesn't matter. Too bad my company doesn't have firefox readily available.
Very true. Developers have their own vision of what the game will be and until the game is produced, I for one don't think they should compromise that, no matter what a beta tester might say. Beta testers are to find bugs and usability problems. They are not to dictate story line or game mechanics. Obviously they can comment all they want, but in the end it's up to the designers to listen. Sometimes these comments make sense, other times it's just crazy. I think a wiser thing would be to have some kind of peer review. If you can have other developers try out a game they'll probably give you more constructive feedback because they speak your language and understand what you're doing (hopefully). However, due to the nature of the business it's obvious that this can't happen for every game. It barely happens for some games.
In the end, I say stay true to the story, release the game, and fix the interface and mechanics for the paying customers, not the idiot beta testers.
I realize you're "just trying to explain what they're doing," but let's review that article once again. As your brother quotes from the article:
If true, such a move would be a massive boost for publishers and developers which do not profit from the lucrative and damaging retail trade in used games. In fact, many publishers are furious that they have to spend support money on consumers who have not actually contributed a dime to the company's coffers.This might be a motivation to Sony. However, to those developers and publishers I say, "Welcome to capitalism." You don't see Krupps or Coffeemate complaining when someone sells a used coffee pot on Ebay do you? It's the same thing. These businesses have no logical leg to stand on here. Software is a product, plain and simple. Obviously I'm bordering on taking this to a patent law / commoditization of software discussion, so I'm going to stop there. But there is no way you can go into business selling a product and not expect secondary sales to occur.
The next illogical step in this argument for Sony, Activision, EA, or whomever is a publicly owned company would be to attempt to get the NYSE and NASDAQ to ban trading their shares on the stock market unless their public offerrings from the company itself because the companies won't benefit from the cash trading hands. Give me a break.
Here's an interesting tidbit about New Jersey and New York income taxes. Last year, my fiance worked in New Jersey for 2 months, January and February. She then moved to Albany where she worked the remainder of the year for a different employer. She cut all ties to New Jersey once she moved, so none of her work was done there. Last month when she filed her income taxes, lo and behold New Jersey taxes people for their entire annual income, regardless of whether you earned it all in New Jersey or not. She basically had to pay income tax twice. New York, on the other hand, only taxed her for her New York income. Personally, I think that the New Jersey tax is worse than the New York telecommuter since she didn't feasibly benefit New Jersey's economy in any way after she moved. You could possibly make an argument that a telecommuter to a New York location does effect the economy there because you're conducting business there.
If you're a stock trader who lives in Jersey (a few do), and you telecommute to your desk in Manhattan to make a trade on the NYSE, isn't that affecting New York's (and some could argue the global) economy?
Actually even better, if you read the contest rules it's not $100k at all. They're giving out a total of $100k. Each contest winner wins $15k. Second place gets $5k. For three months of development at maximum, it's not worth your time. In fact, unless you're doing this in about one man-month, you'd probably be losing money compared to what you'd earn in wages. However, most people who do work on this will be doing it on the side, so this is technically extra money in the bank. Still, unless you have a great idea for a project for this that won't take much time, it's probably not worth the effort to try.
Was wondering that myself...
Not that I have to rationalize my actions to your condescending tone, but I had been using a modified version of Nucleus. I modified it myself to fit my own needs for account creation and management, and comment creation. I also modified it to add a few other features such as a slashdot like poll for fun and also a login mechanism that redirected you to my main url to login and then back to hte page you were browsing to give you the ability to fill out a small form on the current page and click a button and you'd be immediately logged in. The problem was that my digital certificate was for my www domain and I had a few blogs running on other domains so I needed to redirect to the first domain, create a cookie with the proper login info, and then redirect you back to the page you were looking at. All of this required a few hours of coding and testing. Which means to upgrade I'd have to go back through all the code again and figure out what I modified and all that. The reason was that between the version that I used and the next version Nucleus went through a code overhaul that changed quite a bit of stuff internally. It should be noted of course that the code overhaul was done thanks mostly to the Nucleus community complaining that it didn't have enough support against comment spam, which at the time of my site shutdown was just reaching fever pitch. I helped contribute some ideas that were for the most part rejected, but at least stimultated discussion.
Anyways, it got away from me and I had other pressing interests such as school, work, and my Master's Thesis, plus being married didn't help much either. Looking at your "Yahoo hosted" account and the blog that you link to there, it's obvious you were not as successful at getting rid of spam as you said you were.
What about a solution like the SETI project? A nice graphical screensaver that uses spare processor cycles to send email spam to known spammers. It could even display something funny like a graph showing how much harassment you're causing.
However, I don't think any kind of attack spam with spam solution is worth it. We need to either redesign the protocol, marginalize the spammers, or make it very illegal and put them in jail. Sure, you might argue that direct marketing through email really isn't illegal (junk snail mail sure isn't), but I think if you don't respect the don't spam lists and requests to stop, or even go so far as to launch a DOS attack as TFA describes, then you definitely belong behind bars or without access to a computer.
I noticed that your user page doesn't have any submitted stories that made the front page. I also comment fairly regularly and have had three submissions accepted. After my first one, I started receiving 20-30 phishing emails a day in my gmail inbox, and about 5 legitimate emails. That's why I've stopped posting any kind of email whatsoever to this site. As it is, my URL currently goes nowhere as well because shortly after I started using that instead I got hit with comment spam and lacking the time to install a solution like captcha images, I decided to just take the server down instead. This is for a site that got at most 20 people a day who were mostly my friends. We need some kind of international solution to stop these people and the harm they're doing.