1. Spammer X wants to sign up for 100 free email accounts at free-accounts-Y.
2. Spammer X outsources the signup to a confederate who specializes in this service.
3. The confederate outsources the signup to five independent contractors, who in turn work at Chinese internet cafes for 75 cents an hour (three or more times the prevailing wage).
Social security and address allow you to open up a bank account/credit card in someone's name. For that matter, it is enough to social engineer your way through any bank call center in existence ("Hiya, Bank of America, this is Joe Smith. I'm trying to log onto your web site to pay some of my bills but they're telling me my account number is wrong. The number I've got written down is 2342-12342-4532. *waits for number to bounce* Really? Well, I guess I must have the wrong number. So many numbers to remember nowadays, honestly, can't keep them all straight. Could you look mine up for me? *waits* Social security number? Sure thing. 123-456-7890. *waits* Thanks very much Betsy, you've been very helpful. Have a nice day.")
If Bank of America says you don't have an account with them: "What? Thats funny. I thought you guys aquired my bank, you know, First National of . Wasn't you? Well, I'll ask my wife, she'll know. She's always been the smart one with the finances. Sorry to waste your time, Besty. *hangup* Hiya, Citibank, this is Joe Smith. I'm trying to log onto your web site...".
Figure on an absurdly low 3% unemployment rate with 50% of those actively searching (which is absurdly low given that the government only defines people as unemployed if they are actively searching, but we'll say for the sake of argument that some people are telling the government they're looking diligently while eating cheetos in their underwear and bemoaning the unfairness of life), that means the scam would snare 750 people. Thats a pretty nice click through rate, wouldn't you say, when every click is worth a couple thousand dollars.
"Hello, we are Human Resources Solutions International. One of our clients has contracted with us to process your recent job application. You have the option of either waiting for our letter to arrive via registered mail or entering your data in our secure web server located at https://www.scamyourbuttoff.com./ Please note that your application cannot proceed until we have completed our investigation, so it is in your best interest to respond promptly. Thank you and if you have any questions about your employment process please mail Mary Jo at nevergetareply@scamyourbuttoff.com."
Fire that off to 100,000 people and I'll bet probably half of the ones actively doing job searching will go to your website without a second thought.
Depends on what you mean by serious. They're seriously commited to spending a lot of money to examine the possibility of a manned flight. Otherwise, its going to be the same old satellite missions and piggybacking on NASA ships.
I'm sure you guys have heard of our propensity for building bridges here? Including long bridges to islands with no real need for them, built in multiples sufficient to carry the entire population of the island off of it at a single time? Which are then built to withstand typhoons and earthquakes (well, OK, THATS not irrational). This is the same thing, except for the tech industry. And the US government does the same thing -- NASA and a good deal of the Department of Defense R&D fund are basically slushfunds to keep engineers employed in the hope that they come up with something useful in the meantime (and I would be remiss if I didn't point out that pork is well-appreciated come election time).
I don't really know why we love gigantic computers, though. I live in a prefecture which is Japan's answer to rural Iowa and we built a 1,300 node distributed supercomputer without any idea of a feasible application to run on it -- we ended up computing a few zillion solutions to N-Queens before mothballing the project (I was hoping for enough CPU time to take the world record back from the real supercomputer at the Japanese university that currently holds it, but unfortunately it was not to be).
In the real world, one of the selling points of OSS is that its free-as-in-beer. The whole "You get a software system to do what you mean for NO MONEY" thing is a major driver to adopter (particularly in my own workplace, where we're frequently advising third world governments which don't exactly have large technology budgets). Why would you want to tell people "Hah, the number one reason you want to use OSS is a mirage! Its too good to be true! Sucker! You can't actually download Linux off of the Internet and start using it for free!"
For one, there is a defined path to becoming a neurosurgeon. You can decide, in eighth grade, "I want to become a neurosurgeon/lawyer/police officer/accountant" and, at every year from that point on, anyone relevant who you ask will say "I know what your next step needs to be". The steps generally involve a lot of work, but generally not clawing, kicking, and screaming -- just nose-to-the-grindstone following the path thats been clearly laid out for you.
None of your emergency services are 99.99% reliable, and you aren't willing to pay enough money to see that they are. If you call the cops in Chicago for a home invasion, your likelihood of seeing a police officer respond in under twenty minutes is below fifty percent, if I remember the newspaper correctly.
Thats probably because they were bought by a Japanese company which produces them primarily for GPS car systems. They "feel" Japanese because they use the standard Japanese legend for maps -- manji for temples, etc.
I worked with many intelligent engineers at one job and by the end of the second month was delivering most of the powerpoint presentations because they had never, in their professional careers (the shortest of which started when I was still watching Transformers) learned how to explain technical concepts to a non-technical audience. We had one brilliant professor whose idea of a demo was to have scrolling output from a unix script running by at the computer's maximum speed -- he assumed that since he could parse the output (having written the script and knowing what the pattern would look like when it was operating effectively) that an audience who not only didn't know what the script was doing but didn't even know what the larger project was designed to do would be able to follow it. And you can just forget getting an adequate description when one of the decisionmakers asked for specifics -- to a man, all the engineers either said "You wouldn't understand it" or started a l33tspeak throwdown that I had difficulty understanding and I was part of the team that just implemented the algorithm.
Blaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaargh!
Anyhow, your take home message from this post is: It is not wasted effort to learn to communicate effectively in spoken and written English (or, for that matter, any other language you can communicate with a customer in).
Depends on the type of case. You can recoup for frivolous torts in most states and at the federal level, but when the government issues a citation that isn't a tort and you'd have a hard time proving it frivilous even if it were. Soverign immunity plus some unrelated protection for officers in the discharge of their duties makes it extremely difficult to recoup on a tort of "You brought me to court and wasted my time" even if its theoretically possible.
Getting lawyer's fees out of the other side is fairly routine in civil cases, though.
Re:, Wars, Survival, Wealth - Anything But The Gri
on
The Ultimate MMORPG
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· Score: 1
Consider this from the perspective of someone who is NOT in the game 20 hours a day. If you've got six hours to play per week, and you diligently grind your way to level 15, then find your character doesn't exist one day because a force you hadn't even heard about and couldn't have stopped any more than you could spit out a hurricane has crashed the server, are you more likely to feel like a hero in a fantasy epic or like "#$&"#$"#&#$&' Why the #"$%#$'"#$"#%&#"$ am I playing this game?" Multiply that reaction times ten thousand players and you'll see why this is not a feasible idea for an MMORPG. This is like the permadeath debate -- lots of people love the idea because it engages them on some weird intellectual level but if they lost their characters they'd be screaming bloody murder.
Ditto any content which can be consumed once and then is never seen again (burnable orc villages, for example). Your power-gamers are going to Play to Crush regardless of what you do and will consume all content available within hours of release, faster than ANY team can possibly hope to crank it out. Either you go with algorithmic content generation (which, because you can't trust your computer to be a human, is likely just going to be a random-number generator and a script which produces content not much more dynamic than your existing spawn system) or you do things the respawnable way.
(Hopefully, innocent, they're -- OK, spelling mistakes fixed, now we can talk.)
The small stakes and mechanical nature of the process of traffic court work in your favor if you choose to be one of the fraction that actually bothers to show up and contest the charges. Everything is weighted in favor of the officer, obviously, but they have an incentive system similar to AOL's technical support -- if the matter can't be disposed of within 6 minutes get off the line, its a loss. So if you present anything which bears even a cursory resemblance to an adequate defense the judge is likely to say "OK, whatever, be careful in the future. NEXT." Or you can pay a lawyer for the privilege and he'll do the exact same thing, except you'll be out more money than the fine was worth (incentives work both ways).
Same story here. I paid approximately USD$10 for the upgrade from 8 MB/s (the lowest my internet company would let me buy) to 50 MB/s but have never achieved download speeds in excess of 1 MB/s because I'm always limited by the other side's pipe. I suppose if I used file sharing software it would be more useful. On the other hand, it IS nice to saturate the connection for WoW patches:)
I think it was more the "Cooperate with the Nazis regarding Jewish refugees and seized assets" rather than the "Put fear of God into world's most powerful army with our sidearms" that got them out of the most recent war...
Nope. If you have someone's Bank of America account information (you don't need a number -- just their username and password for the website), you can use their BillPay service to send a cashier's check anywhere in the USA. Its not covered by your "$50 maximum liability and we'll wave that anyhow" credit card policy, and its limited by your checking/savings account balance, not your credit card limit. BoA, and I love them dearly, has made their website very, very useful at the expense of allowing you to financially ruin anyone who gets phished.
Bottom line: If a credit card of mine gets stolen tomorrow its a major pain in the rear end but I get all my money back. If someone ever breaks into my BoA account all my assets in the US vanish the same day and don't come back.
Only problem is closed economies are *unfun to play in*. To pick one of many, many problems with them, hording leads to materials being taken out of circulation, which can cause massive headaches for players. Back when UO was a semi-closed economy, a dedicated guild established a total monopoly on Black Pearl, a spell reagent which was required for teleportation. That was fun in a gee-whiz way for about thirty-five seconds ("Wow, isn't this game cool? You can simulate the behavior of a cartel!") before everyone realized that the 95% of the players who were not guild members were forced to spend hours and hours of wasted time every day due to loss of the ability to teleport.
There are other problems, too. Inactive players removing items from circulation, population imbalances (too many players = everyone gets more poor), pure hell on earth when the hardcore element reduces the average wealth of the casual gamer to barely enough to physically play the game, etc.
"Sweet, you get a charisma bonus for dropping coffee on yourself. Pass me another cuppa, I'm going to ask that girl in marketing out later and need all the help I can get."
Yes, the bubble years were fun while they lasted. It was indeed a nice time to get hired for $80,000 a year because you could write a Perl script which could take a directory full of JPEGs and make an index out of them ($120,000 if you could figure out a way to include thumbnails). Those days are not coming back, because there is no reason why you should be paid professional rates for doing a job which has the intellectual content of plumbing minus the elbow grease. Start aiming yourself at a career which can't be learned in two courses at your local community college and you, too, will be immune to outsourcing to India.
Some ideas of things with which you can justify the salary you want to get: language expertise, and I'm not talking C#. "Bah, I don't need to study a foreign language in college, thats what the localization company is for" -- you will find the first time you are in conference with Mr. Nakayama trying to understand his requirements list that this was fairly shortsighted. True, sometimes Mr. Nakayama speaks English -- but then he can go speak English with a quarter of the population of India, can't he? Why don't you learn to speak Japanese and take the cut the translators/localizers are going to take for yourself? (Or pick another language: Mandarin, Korean, Arabic, Spanish, whatever -- and if you think there are already too many qualified engineers who are bilingual in these take a look at the man pages in your favorite Linux distribution in any non-English language sometime)
There are other bits of globalization that people just don't seem to get: encoding standards (can you explain the difference between UTF16, UTF8, JIS? I've dealt with fifteen academics who do text processing for a living who can't, and my guess is India is not on average much better), designing to an audience who doesn't natively speak English, etc.
Languages, of course, are hard to learn. Thats the main advantage from your point of view: pick a skill that prices people out of the market, something that they can't pick up in their spare time, something that the guy in Bangalore says "Why the heck would I bother learning this when I could be working for $10 an hour on RentACoder?". A lot of the specific business logic in various industries screams for this. So does the CS part of CS, as opposed to the comparitively simple mechanics of actual code writing. If you have the benefit of an expensive four-year university education don't throw it down the tubes with course choices which mimic a two-year technical degree -- spread your mind a bit and reach harder stuff.
Incidentally, communicating in the English language is another skill that the market values and that engineers are, on average, woefully incompetant at. I don't mean "Can write a three-sentence email describing to another engineer what the holdup is" -- half of Bangalore can do that. I mean "Can give a half an hour presentation to a mixed audience of engineers and marketing-droids to explain why a $100,000 increase in your department's budget will help the business and why, while meanwhile fielding hostile questions with aplomb". Seriously, half of what my last job called me most useful for didn't happen at my desk, it happened at a podium in front of the decisionmakers.
Slashdot Mirror
1. Spammer X wants to sign up for 100 free email accounts at free-accounts-Y.
2. Spammer X outsources the signup to a confederate who specializes in this service.
3. The confederate outsources the signup to five independent contractors, who in turn work at Chinese internet cafes for 75 cents an hour (three or more times the prevailing wage).
If Bank of America says you don't have an account with them: "What? Thats funny. I thought you guys aquired my bank, you know, First National of . Wasn't you? Well, I'll ask my wife, she'll know. She's always been the smart one with the finances. Sorry to waste your time, Besty. *hangup* Hiya, Citibank, this is Joe Smith. I'm trying to log onto your web site...".
Figure on an absurdly low 3% unemployment rate with 50% of those actively searching (which is absurdly low given that the government only defines people as unemployed if they are actively searching, but we'll say for the sake of argument that some people are telling the government they're looking diligently while eating cheetos in their underwear and bemoaning the unfairness of life), that means the scam would snare 750 people. Thats a pretty nice click through rate, wouldn't you say, when every click is worth a couple thousand dollars.
"Hello, we are Human Resources Solutions International. One of our clients has contracted with us to process your recent job application. You have the option of either waiting for our letter to arrive via registered mail or entering your data in our secure web server located at https://www.scamyourbuttoff.com./ Please note that your application cannot proceed until we have completed our investigation, so it is in your best interest to respond promptly. Thank you and if you have any questions about your employment process please mail Mary Jo at nevergetareply@scamyourbuttoff.com."
Fire that off to 100,000 people and I'll bet probably half of the ones actively doing job searching will go to your website without a second thought.
Depends on what you mean by serious. They're seriously commited to spending a lot of money to examine the possibility of a manned flight. Otherwise, its going to be the same old satellite missions and piggybacking on NASA ships.
Could you please copy and paste this to everyone who asks whether it runs Linux or will work in a Beowolf cluster?
1865 just cabled in a correction to the parent. Stop. They had telegraphed earlier. Stop. Message Ends.
I don't really know why we love gigantic computers, though. I live in a prefecture which is Japan's answer to rural Iowa and we built a 1,300 node distributed supercomputer without any idea of a feasible application to run on it -- we ended up computing a few zillion solutions to N-Queens before mothballing the project (I was hoping for enough CPU time to take the world record back from the real supercomputer at the Japanese university that currently holds it, but unfortunately it was not to be).
You want a pony? Click here.
In the real world, one of the selling points of OSS is that its free-as-in-beer. The whole "You get a software system to do what you mean for NO MONEY" thing is a major driver to adopter (particularly in my own workplace, where we're frequently advising third world governments which don't exactly have large technology budgets). Why would you want to tell people "Hah, the number one reason you want to use OSS is a mirage! Its too good to be true! Sucker! You can't actually download Linux off of the Internet and start using it for free!"
Oh, Desktstars... sorry, I had a fit of nerdlexia there.
For one, there is a defined path to becoming a neurosurgeon. You can decide, in eighth grade, "I want to become a neurosurgeon/lawyer/police officer/accountant" and, at every year from that point on, anyone relevant who you ask will say "I know what your next step needs to be". The steps generally involve a lot of work, but generally not clawing, kicking, and screaming -- just nose-to-the-grindstone following the path thats been clearly laid out for you.
None of your emergency services are 99.99% reliable, and you aren't willing to pay enough money to see that they are. If you call the cops in Chicago for a home invasion, your likelihood of seeing a police officer respond in under twenty minutes is below fifty percent, if I remember the newspaper correctly.
*Unfortunately, working in my office also requires fluency in Japanese sufficient to explain why that joke is funny.
Thats probably because they were bought by a Japanese company which produces them primarily for GPS car systems. They "feel" Japanese because they use the standard Japanese legend for maps -- manji for temples, etc.
Blaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaargh!
Anyhow, your take home message from this post is: It is not wasted effort to learn to communicate effectively in spoken and written English (or, for that matter, any other language you can communicate with a customer in).
Getting lawyer's fees out of the other side is fairly routine in civil cases, though.
Ditto any content which can be consumed once and then is never seen again (burnable orc villages, for example). Your power-gamers are going to Play to Crush regardless of what you do and will consume all content available within hours of release, faster than ANY team can possibly hope to crank it out. Either you go with algorithmic content generation (which, because you can't trust your computer to be a human, is likely just going to be a random-number generator and a script which produces content not much more dynamic than your existing spawn system) or you do things the respawnable way.
The small stakes and mechanical nature of the process of traffic court work in your favor if you choose to be one of the fraction that actually bothers to show up and contest the charges. Everything is weighted in favor of the officer, obviously, but they have an incentive system similar to AOL's technical support -- if the matter can't be disposed of within 6 minutes get off the line, its a loss. So if you present anything which bears even a cursory resemblance to an adequate defense the judge is likely to say "OK, whatever, be careful in the future. NEXT." Or you can pay a lawyer for the privilege and he'll do the exact same thing, except you'll be out more money than the fine was worth (incentives work both ways).
Same story here. I paid approximately USD$10 for the upgrade from 8 MB/s (the lowest my internet company would let me buy) to 50 MB/s but have never achieved download speeds in excess of 1 MB/s because I'm always limited by the other side's pipe. I suppose if I used file sharing software it would be more useful. On the other hand, it IS nice to saturate the connection for WoW patches :)
I think it was more the "Cooperate with the Nazis regarding Jewish refugees and seized assets" rather than the "Put fear of God into world's most powerful army with our sidearms" that got them out of the most recent war...
Bottom line: If a credit card of mine gets stolen tomorrow its a major pain in the rear end but I get all my money back. If someone ever breaks into my BoA account all my assets in the US vanish the same day and don't come back.
There are other problems, too. Inactive players removing items from circulation, population imbalances (too many players = everyone gets more poor), pure hell on earth when the hardcore element reduces the average wealth of the casual gamer to barely enough to physically play the game, etc.
"Sweet, you get a charisma bonus for dropping coffee on yourself. Pass me another cuppa, I'm going to ask that girl in marketing out later and need all the help I can get."
Yes, the bubble years were fun while they lasted. It was indeed a nice time to get hired for $80,000 a year because you could write a Perl script which could take a directory full of JPEGs and make an index out of them ($120,000 if you could figure out a way to include thumbnails). Those days are not coming back, because there is no reason why you should be paid professional rates for doing a job which has the intellectual content of plumbing minus the elbow grease. Start aiming yourself at a career which can't be learned in two courses at your local community college and you, too, will be immune to outsourcing to India.
Some ideas of things with which you can justify the salary you want to get: language expertise, and I'm not talking C#. "Bah, I don't need to study a foreign language in college, thats what the localization company is for" -- you will find the first time you are in conference with Mr. Nakayama trying to understand his requirements list that this was fairly shortsighted. True, sometimes Mr. Nakayama speaks English -- but then he can go speak English with a quarter of the population of India, can't he? Why don't you learn to speak Japanese and take the cut the translators/localizers are going to take for yourself? (Or pick another language: Mandarin, Korean, Arabic, Spanish, whatever -- and if you think there are already too many qualified engineers who are bilingual in these take a look at the man pages in your favorite Linux distribution in any non-English language sometime)
There are other bits of globalization that people just don't seem to get: encoding standards (can you explain the difference between UTF16, UTF8, JIS? I've dealt with fifteen academics who do text processing for a living who can't, and my guess is India is not on average much better), designing to an audience who doesn't natively speak English, etc.
Languages, of course, are hard to learn. Thats the main advantage from your point of view: pick a skill that prices people out of the market, something that they can't pick up in their spare time, something that the guy in Bangalore says "Why the heck would I bother learning this when I could be working for $10 an hour on RentACoder?". A lot of the specific business logic in various industries screams for this. So does the CS part of CS, as opposed to the comparitively simple mechanics of actual code writing. If you have the benefit of an expensive four-year university education don't throw it down the tubes with course choices which mimic a two-year technical degree -- spread your mind a bit and reach harder stuff.
Incidentally, communicating in the English language is another skill that the market values and that engineers are, on average, woefully incompetant at. I don't mean "Can write a three-sentence email describing to another engineer what the holdup is" -- half of Bangalore can do that. I mean "Can give a half an hour presentation to a mixed audience of engineers and marketing-droids to explain why a $100,000 increase in your department's budget will help the business and why, while meanwhile fielding hostile questions with aplomb". Seriously, half of what my last job called me most useful for didn't happen at my desk, it happened at a podium in front of the decisionmakers.