Being a market leader is very lucrative for a tech company. For software products in particular, almost the entire cost of the product is spent upfront. Each new license/page view/whatever you get goes straight to the bottom line.
Of course the scammers have to convincet themselves that what they are doing isn't that bad. I find people's ability to fool themselves fascinating.
The thing that gets me is that the only people I know that might fall for a scam like this are senile - I don't have any statistics to back myself up but I'm guessing most of the people they scam from can't afford to lose it.
I don't have a link handy but these scams constitute a significant percentage of Nigeria's economy (I've heard estimates of 10%), so I'm not sure they should really be interested in curtailing it.
Perhaps they were expecting the geometric equivalent of a minimum spanning tree (good for most cases) and you gave them the (actually optimal) geometric equivalent of the Steiner Tree problem?
You're not the only one who thinks that highly of Dune - it's ranked #1 on the Locus list:
http://www.locusmag.com/SFAwards/Db/LocusAT1975.ht ml#allnvl
Given that, he should be in soon...
Think about it - as long as what we're sending out is clearly nonrandom, an alien race would interpret it to mean there is someone trying to communicate. Send Fibonacci sequences or something.
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Being a market leader is very lucrative for a tech company. For software products in particular, almost the entire cost of the product is spent upfront. Each new license/page view/whatever you get goes straight to the bottom line.
Of course the scammers have to convincet themselves that what they are doing isn't that bad. I find people's ability to fool themselves fascinating. The thing that gets me is that the only people I know that might fall for a scam like this are senile - I don't have any statistics to back myself up but I'm guessing most of the people they scam from can't afford to lose it.
I don't have a link handy but these scams constitute a significant percentage of Nigeria's economy (I've heard estimates of 10%), so I'm not sure they should really be interested in curtailing it.
No, the original prices for most good new SNES games was 69.99.
Perhaps they were expecting the geometric equivalent of a minimum spanning tree (good for most cases) and you gave them the (actually optimal) geometric equivalent of the Steiner Tree problem?
Ron Paul. http://www.house.gov/paul/ He's the only one I know of.
You're not the only one who thinks that highly of Dune - it's ranked #1 on the Locus list: http://www.locusmag.com/SFAwards/Db/LocusAT1975.ht ml#allnvl
Given that, he should be in soon...
Think about it - as long as what we're sending out is clearly nonrandom, an alien race would interpret it to mean there is someone trying to communicate. Send Fibonacci sequences or something.