taint.org: Justin Mason’s Weblog

Wall Street banks in $70bn staff payout:

Financial workers at Wall Street’s top banks are to receive pay deals worth more than $70bn (£40bn) [equivalent to 10% of the US government bail-out package], a substantial proportion of which is expected to be paid in discretionary bonuses, for their work so far this year - despite plunging the global financial system into its worst crisis since the 1929 stock market crash, the Guardian has learned.

Lloyds chief tells staff: you’ll still get bonuses:

The chief executive of Lloyds TSB, one of the banks participating in the [UK] £37bn bank bail-out, has promised staff they will receive bonuses this year despite Gordon Brown’s promise of a crackdown on bankers’ pay following the investment by taxpayers.

In a recorded message to employees, Daniels stressed that the bank faced “very, very few restrictions” in its behaviour despite the injection of up to £5.5bn of taxpayers’ funds. “If you think about it, the first restriction was not to pay bonuses. Well Lloyds TSB is in fact going to pay bonuses. I think our staff have done a terrific job this year. There is no reason why we shouldn’t.”

Now that takes nerve.

Tags: bailout, banking, bonuses, money, pay, work

• Review of bicycle helmet effectiveness studies : quite a few case-control studies consistently demonstrating the protective effects of bicycle helmet use on shared roadways
  (tags: cycling helmets safety health statistics)

• Spammer-X’s numbers on spam profitability : he claimed that he made net $336k per year from spamming in 2004
  (tags: via:tzink spammer-x spam money pay profit motives)

Tags: cycling, health, helmets, money, motives, pay, profit, safety, spam, spammer-x, statistics, via:tzink

• Dublin’s new M50 electronic toll tags : what a mess! there are no less than 8 tag operators and a bewildering array of prices and penalties. typical
  (tags: ireland dublin m50 tolls roads pricing)

• Sustained IO on EBS == No Bueno : worrying stats for Amazon EBS data throughput, dropping from 160 MB/s to a rather paltry 42.4 MB/s
  (tags: amazon ebs ec2 speed networking hosting benchmarks)

• MXLogic on the economics of spam : Sam Masiello of MXLogic works out that phishers may be netting a 7300% profit margin; this is why spam’s not going away. mind you he does this by believing Gartner figures, which is never a good idea
  (tags: sam-masiello mxlogic via:tzink phishing spam money)

Tags: amazon, benchmarks, dublin, ebs, ec2, hosting, ireland, m50, money, mxlogic, networking, phishing, pricing, roads, sam-masiello, spam, speed, tolls, via:tzink

This question came up on a forum I’m on. It turns out it’s really quite easy to work out — this page covers pretty much all the details.

In addition to what’s there, it’s worth noting that the current Irish price for a kilowatt-hour under the ESB’s domestic rate is 12.73 cents per kWh, which works out as 14.41 cents per kWh once the 13.5% VAT is added in. So Irish users, pretend you live in New Hampshire (15 cents per kWh) to get realistic figures from the excellent cost calculator.

Using this, it looks like if I was to leave an 160W desktop computer on permanently in Ireland, I’d be spending 215 euros per year to power it. Wow, that’s pricey! My strategy of using low-noise, low-power hardware for home servers has paid off already, in that case. ;)

For what it’s worth, if you’re worrying about the power consumption of an NTL digital Pace Digital TV set-top box — if this Pace presentation is anything to go by, it appears the standby power consumption is on the order of 1-2 watts — about 2 euros per year. Grand.

Tags: costs, electricity, environment, green, money, power, saving, watts

Web: i caught sight of (8 June 2005, Interconnected), on the geographical insularity of the dot-com boom. A good read:

The huge influx of cash at the turn of the millennium led to the whole Web being built in the image of the Bay area. The website patterns that started there and - just by coincidence - happened to scale to other environments, those were the ones that survived.

Lots to think about. He’s spot on, of course — many of the web’s big commercial success stories are almost shamelessly US-oriented, and if they work outside that, it’s purely by accident.

I’d love to see more web businesses that work well for other parts of the world, but that’ll take money — and from what I saw in Dublin, the money either (a) just isn’t there, or (b) frequently goes to the companies that talk the talk, but then piddle it away on ludicrous ‘e-business architectures’ and get nothing useful out the other end.

On both counts, Silicon Valley has an ace up its sleeve. The VCs are smart and well-funded, and the developers have experience, and know which tools are right for the job.

I’d be curious to hear how other high-tech hotspots in the US (Boston, for example) find this.

Tags: boom, influx, insularity, interconnected, june, money, read, sight, talk, web

Patents: oh, this is painfully ironic.

patents4innovation.org is a PR site set up by EICTA, a consortium of several pro-software-patent multinational companies, to put some PR money into lobbying for the legalisation of swpats in the EU. I’ve mentioned it before in the context of another boo-boo. Well, here’s the next one.

According to FFII, they recently took a Creative-Commons-licensed article from another website, and:

• republished it without the required attribution to the author
• translated it, creating a ‘derived work’, against the terms of the license
• and then failed to notify readers of the licensing terms, as required

In other words, they managed to infringe the terms of its copyright-based licensing in multiple clauses.

No wonder they claim that patents are required to protect people’s inventions. It seems they just don’t understand how copyright-based licensing works ;)

(The article’s been taken down from the p4i site, but not before the boo-boo was spotted by an eagle-eyed FFII’er.)

Tags: article, consortium, eicta, ffii, innovation, legalisation, licensing, money, org, patents, site

Computer: Argh. When I bought my laptop, I had no option but to buy it with Windows XP — IBM doesn’t seem to sell them any other way. (you can pay extra to buy it that way from EmperorLinux, but really, the main reason I wouldn’t want it is to save money, I’m afraid.)

Anyway, so I kept the XP partition safe, and jumped through various hoops to keep it in one piece; after all, it had cost me money to pay for that Windows license, and you never know when I might need it to upgrade some firmware or whatever.

Well, after trying (twice) to upgrade some firmware — the BIOS, namely, to get APM hibernation working — and having XP crash on me both times, I left it for a bit.

That was a couple of weeks ago. I just tried to check some files on the /windows partition — and something has scribbled all over the FAT32 sectors. Rien de Windows plus. :(

(Prime suspect right now is the Phoenix BIOS ’suspend-to-disk’ tool — I just looks flakey, and I know it goes in and tweaks with some kind of undocumented BIOS wierdness. I bet anything it’s told the BIOS that the first FAT32 partition was a suspend partition, and one of the failed susp-to-disk attempts scribbled all over it.)

I suppose I’ll probably reinstall at some stage… if only to get this bloody BIOS upgraded and suspend-to-disk working!

Tags: argh, bios, computer, fat, firmware, laptop, money, option, partition, way, windows

Ireland: A while back, I posted ‘Room for an Irish Netflix’, which plugged the idea of opening a version of the Netflix concept for Ireland. Well, over on the taint.org QT forum, JCorbett says: ‘ DVDRentals.ie is what you’re looking for!’

Sure enough, it looks pretty good — 20 eurons a month, and a reasonable selection (considering they just started).

But it limits how many DVDs you can get out in a month to 8. IMO, that’s unnecessary — nobody can watch DVDs and turn them around through the postal system that quickly!

Also, the browsing interface is lousy — I’d suggest licensing some kind of metadata from IMDb or similar, so people can get third-party reviews, comments, ‘my favourite action movie’ lists, that kind of thing.

Can’t tell much more, as the FAQ page doesn’t work on Mozilla/Firebird for some damn reason.

Sick: Anger as contestants hungry for money go begging on TV (Irish Indo) (via forteana):

A reality television show in which 12 young Russian contestants have to scrounge, beg and even steal to win a pension for life, is being filmed in Berlin.

In a city already struggling with bankruptcy and large numbers of asylum-seekers, police and residents have been quick to condemn Golod, Russian for ‘hunger’. The contestants live in a container without money or food to survive; none of them speaks German. ‘Golod’ is proving a huge hit with Moscow television viewers, thousands of whom tune in at nine each evening to find out how Karina, Anastasia and 10 other photogenic contestants are faring on the mean streets of a foreign city.

Spam: Latest Pew Internet report on spam. Pew Internet surveys are very good. This one notes that ‘25% of America’s email users say they are using email less because of spam. Within that group, most say that spam has reduced their overall use of email in a big way.’

Mafia: A mafia hacker tells his story to Wired (Simson Garfinkel via FoRK).

Tags: city, dvds, email, golod, ireland, irish, kind, money, month, netflix, spam

Science: Fantastic article in New Scientist volume 180 (4 Oct 2003), covering how science is beginning to identify the keys to a happy life, and perform studies measuring people’s happiness.

That’s a subscribers-only link unfortunately, but I’ll excerpt a few choice snippets:

First off, money:

Can money buy happiness? The short answer is, yes - but it doesn’t buy you very much. And once you can afford to feed, clothe and house yourself, each extra dollar makes less and less difference. … In the past half-century, average income has skyrocketed in industrialised countries, yet happiness levels have remained static (see Graph). It seems absolute income doesn’t make much difference once you have enough to meet your basic needs. Instead, the key seems to be whether you have more than your friends, neighbours and colleagues.

Looks:

First the bad news: good-looking people really are happier. When Diener got people to rate their own looks, both with and without make-up, there was a ’small but positive effect of physical attractiveness on subjective well-being’.

But don’t compare your looks with what the media puts out:

In a new study, Laurie Mintz and her colleagues from the University of Missouri-Columbia found that women who saw advertisements featuring lithe and flawless young models for just one to three minutes rated their own bodies more negatively and showed an increase in depression. Mintz was alarmed how quickly the women’s self-esteem was undermined. And she believes people are becoming more dissatisfied as new technology allows the media to create ever more unrealistic images.

Mintz recommends less drastic steps to contentment: avoid unrealistic media images; understand that such pictures are airbrushed and ‘Photoshopped’ to perfection; appreciate your body for what it does rather than how it looks.

Friends:

It is hard to imagine a more pitiful existence than life on the streets of Calcutta or in one of its slums, or making a living there as a prostitute. Yet despite the poverty and squalor they face, such people are much happier than you might imagine. ‘We think social relationships are partly responsible,’ says Diener.

And a global comparison:

The latest global analysis of how levels of satisfaction and happiness vary from country to country shows that the most ’satisfied’ people tend to live in Latin America, Western Europe and North America. Eastern Europeans are the least satisfied.

… There is plenty more about national happiness levels that has researchers scratching their heads. One of the most significant observations is that in industrialised nations, average happiness has remained virtually static since the second world war, despite a considerable rise in average income (see Graphic). The exception is Denmark, where people have become more satisfied with life over the past 30 years - no one is quite sure why.

and the effects of consumerism:

A growing number of researchers are putting the static trend down to consumerism. Survey after survey has shown that the desire for material goods, which has increased hand in hand with average income, is a ‘happiness suppressant’.

One study, by Tim Kasser at Knox College in Galesburg, Illinois, found that young adults who focus on money, image and fame tend to be more depressed, have less enthusiasm for life and suffer more physical symptoms such as headaches and sore throats than others (The High Price of Materialism, MIT Press, 2002). Kasser believes that people tend to embrace material values when they are feeling insecure (retail therapy, anyone?). ‘Advertisements have become more sophisticated,’ says Kasser. ‘They try to tie their message to people’s psychological needs. But it is a false link. It is toxic.’

Lots of good bits. Pity it’s subscribers-only!

Tags: article, difference, fantastic, happiness, income, life, money, new, science, scientist, volume

e-Voting: Wired has an absolutely mind-numbing list of issues with the security of Diebold voting machine procedures, including passwords printed in manuals which the staff can take home, that same password being reused for multiple systems including the on-site machines at polling stations, tamper-resistance measures being omitted, poll supervisors hired without background checks, bicycle locks being used to secure voting machines, one shared key used to ’secure’ the memory cards, etc.

‘The election process is mainly based on trust,’ Ginnold said. ‘We trust that poll workers are not going to be tampering with them.’

It’s simply insane to replace a known-good voting system (even if it’s just First-Past-the-Post instead of Proportional Representation, but that’s another issue) with a quick hack like this, IMO.

Please vote anyway, if you’re a CA citizen. And not for the fondling meathead, naturally.

DMCA: EFF: Unintended Consequences: Five Years under the DMCA. An incredible list of cases where the DMCA was used unfairly to restrict competition, research, or fair use, some of which I didn’t even know about. For example, I didn’t realise that the International Information Hiding Workshop Conference will no longer hold conferences on US soil after Professor Ed Felten was threatened over their SDMI paper.

Politics: Michael Moore on how to talk to your conservative brother-in-law. MM may play to the gallery now and again, but sometimes, he’s a genius:

Paying workers more money makes you money!

Dear brother-in-law, when you don’t pay people enough for them to take care of life’s essentials, it ends up costing you and everybody else a lot of money. When you pay your employees more money, what do you think they do with it? Invest it in stocks? Hoard it in offshore accounts? No! They spend it! And what do they spend it on? The stuff you make and sell! If you pay people squat, or lay them off, they can’t buy your stuff. They become a drain on the economy; some turn to crime, and when they turn to crime, it’s your Mercedes they want, not some junker Oldsmobile in their poor neighbour’s driveway.

Science: IgNobel prize winners 2003, including a prize for the nation of Liechtenstein for renting out the entire country for ‘corporate conventions, weddings, bar mitzvahs, and other gatherings’.

Tags: brother-in-law, diebold, dmca, e-voting, list, money, poll, security, stuff, voting, wired

A classic Ali G moment, via Maureen Dowd in the New York Times (username: sitescooper/sitescooper):

• YOUNG MAN: How does you make countries do stuff you want?
• MR. BAKER: Well, the way you deal with countries on foreign policy issues . . . is you deal with carrots and sticks.
• YOUNG MAN: But what country is gonna want carrots, even if it’s like a million tons of carrots that you’re giving over there—-
• MR. BAKER: Well, carrots — I’m not using the term literally. You might send foreign aid — money, money.
• YOUNG MAN: Well, money’s better than carrots. Even if a country love carrots and that is, like, their favorite national food, if they get given them—-
• MR. BAKER: Well, don’t get hung up on carrots. That’s just a figure of speech.
• YOUNG MAN: So would you ever send carrots? You know, is there any situation—-
• MR. BAKER: No, no.
• YOUNG MAN: What about if there was a famine?
• MR. BAKER: Carrots, themselves? No.

Beautiful.

Initially, there were a lot of media reports in the UK and Ireland, about how negatively it was taken in the US; this interview with the director reckons that was rubbish put about by UK media:

‘I’ve got a theory about this: In Britain, we’re no longer world leaders in anything. … Yet the one thing we still maintain, and cling on to jealously, is that we’ve got the best sense of humour in the world. So we don’t like the idea that people in other countries get our sense of humour. We prefer to cling to the idea that our comedy is too sophisticated for the Americans And yet the truth is rather different. If you look at sitcoms, with a couple of exceptions, all the best ones come from America, like Friends, Frasier, Seinfeld and so on.’

‘I actually think Americans get the undertones of satire almost better than the British. It can’t be coincidence that the best comedies on our TV are all imported from America.’

But then even the bad reviews never said that Ali G was too sophisticated, complaining instead that the satire wasn’t subtle enough. Maybe the Americans are the more comedy-literate, after all.

Tags: ali, baker, country, humour, idea, money, satire, sense, sitescooper, world

“I am Mr Brunce Anthony, the bill exchange director at the NATIONAL WESTMINSTER BANK PLC.” Yes, it’s a 419 from that well-known third-world country, the UK.

(PS: Brunce?! what kind of name is that?! Everyone knows only Americans have that kind of ludicrous given name ;)

Date: Wed, 13 Nov 2002 10:40:51 +0100
From: “Brunce Anthony” (spam-protected)
To: (spam-protected)
Subject: FROM: BRUNCE IN UK

Dear Sir,

I am Mr Brunce Anthony, the bill exchange director at the NATIONAL WESTMINSTER BANK PLC, 135 BISHOPSGATE LONDON EC2M 3UR.

I am writing this letter to solicit for support and assistance from you to carry out this business opportunity in my department. Lying in an inactive account is the sum of

Thirty Million United States Dollars($30,000,000.00)belonging 

to a foreign customer(Stanley Heard),the former President(Bill Clinton’s personal physician) and Chairman of the National Chiropractic Health Care Advisory Committee who happens to be deceased.

He died with his wife and two children in a plane crash on Board a small airplane that plunged into a river. Ever since he died the Bank has been expecting his next of kin to come and claim these funds.

To this effect, we cannot release the money unless some one applies for it as the next of kin, as indicated in our Banking Guideline. Unfortunately he has no family member here in the UK or America who are aware of the existence of the money as he was he was a contract physician to the Chairman of Royal Bank of Scotland.

At this juncture I have decided to do business with you in colloboration with

officials that matter in the Bank, to this effect we solicit your assistance, 

in applying as the next of kin, then the money will be proccesed and released to you, as we do not want this money to go into the Bank, Treasury as an unclaimed bill.

The Banking law and guideline stipulate that if such money remains unclaimed for a period of Five years the money will be transfered into the Bank s’ Treasury as unclaimed bill. Our request for a Foreigner as a next of kin is occassioned by the fact that the customer was a Foreigner and a British cannot stand as next of kin.

Sir, 15% of the money will be your share as a Foreign partner, while 5% will be for any expenses incured during the transaction, thereafter we would visit your country once the money hits your account for disbursement and investment.

Please reach me at the above email or fax if willing to do business with us.

Best regards,

Mr. Brunce Anthony

Tags: bank, bill, director, exchange, kin, kind, money, name, national, westminster

a good reply to the Nigerian scams, on Slashdot:

…unfortunately I don’t have that much money. I do have seventeen dollars and fifty-six cents. I really want you to have all of that. I hope you can overlook the fact that I’m several million short of your goal, but the key is that I try hard and I’m an excellent wind surfer.

Tags: fact, goal, key, money, nigerian, reply, seventeen, slashdot, surfer, wind

a spam mail asks: jm, do we have your money? There’s a very simple answer: “no you don’t, and you never will, you scumbags”. Scutterin’ gobsheens, as Podge and Rodge would say.

Spent an enlightening day clambering around Dublin’s rooftops with a bunch of helium balloons on a 20-metre piece of string. Can you guess what I was doing? Yes, it’s the latest geek pastime: Hunt The Line Of Sight!

All was well — we found it, the weather was lovely, my Aussie-learnt balloon technique rocked, and we came up with some better ways to do it in future ;)

Tags: answer, bunch, day, helium, mail, money, podge, scutterin, spam, spent

A very cool, very simple Flash animation — follow the money! (via the IRRs)

Tags: animation, cool, flash, irrs, money

A message from David Prior quotes the FCC’s Michael Powell, stating that “the amount of money BT spent on a 3G licence, plus that which will be spent on development and roll-out, could have funded (fibre-to-the-home) deployment to 95%+ of households in the UK.” Sickening.

Tags: amount, deployment, development, fcc, licence, message, money, roll-out, sickening

Gerry reckons the Irish Times are taking the piss.

Date: Tue, 01 May 2001 14:42:46 +0100
From: “Gerry Carr” (spam-protected)
To: (spam-protected)
Subject: IT are taking the piss out of me

Mere days after I send them this letter

Dear Sir,

Having read Mr Cruishank’s invaluable insight into the Health Shambles, can I offer the majority of your contributors a handy Irish Times letter generator;

Dear Sir/A Chara

How can one convince this Government that we need; a decent health system; help for the homeless; housing for travellers; free care for drug addicts; help for the 3rd World; free computers for every school; more social welfare money; more money for teachers/nurses/doctors/public servants/dustbinmen/soldiers wives

much more urgently than:

2 stadiums; a spike in O Connell Street; politicians’ beanos on St Patrick’s Day; a Eurovision song contest; sponsoring a race car; bailing out RTE; fireworks on the Liffey; a government jet/building/pay rise/reception/refurbishment/chauffer/travel expenses/secretary/ etc.

Is the government lacking morals/priorities/reason/sense of proportion/focus/ethics/

yours etc/Is mise [ADD NAME HERE]

Just delete as appropriate and you’ve got yourself 6 months worth of material.

Yours etc.

They print these 4 in a row;

POLICY ON SPORTS STADIUMS

Sir, - Let’s see if I understand the £60 million offer of our money to the GAA. It appears to have been offered the money to ensure that foreign games would not be played at Croke Park (thereby strengthening case for Stadium Ireland), and on the understanding that some key GAA matches would be played at the folly. In effect, does this mean that the payment is designed to ensure that Croke Park will be under-utilised? Just how far are our politicians willing to go to support an ego trip which could cost a billion or so by the time it is build? How will its annual financial costs of, say, £60 million be met? That amount equates to a Croke Park “donation” for every year to infinity! Surely, this money could be better used - to reduce the national debt, improve the infrastructure, assist the underprivileged and so on. Yours, etc.,

BRIAN FLANAGAN, Blackrock, Co Dublin. Sir, - The money being proposed for financing a national stadium in Abbotstown would be equally well spent on a submerged clock counting down the 998-plus years, second by second, to the next millennium. - Yours, etc.,

JERRY TWOMEY, Woodlawn Court, Santry, Dublin 9. Sir, - I would like our Taoiseach to complete the following sentence. I believe that £1 billion should be spent on a national stadium and not on our ailing health service because . . . - Is mise,

CIARAN MacAONGHUSA Baile an tSratha, Tír Chonaill. Sir, - Haemophiliacs are offered £4 million, the GAA is to receive £60 million. What a great little country we live in. - Yours, etc.,

EAMONN TIERNEY, Beverly Avenue, Knocklyon, Dublin 16.

Tags: date, gaa, government, health, irish, letter, money, sir, times, tue