On Mon, 16 Apr 2001 14:24:23 -0400, [log in to unmask] wrote:

>X-no-Archive:yes
>At the risk of seeming to be an apologist for UD (United Devices) Agent,
>Glenn's post got me wondering about the behavior of their agent, so I did a
>bit of digging.
[...]
>I must also wonder out loud about Wirt's questions. Can we trust the
gringos
>who are offering us some shiny beads for something we have willingly
shared?
>Also, is a "big lottery" approach better or worse than a flat but low fee
>paid for each unit of work? Who we would trust, and what efforts we would
>willingly share in, has all the makings of an OT thread that could take on
a
>life of its own, [... too late :)]

Well, I'll throw my 2 cents into the bucket on this one -- I for one would
NOT trust any form of "lottery" as payment.

   1) there is no guarantee that the "winners" are actual people [i.e., it
would be very difficult to track down the so-called "winners" to see that
they really exist...]

   2) as the number of users goes up, the chances of receiving the prize
[if truly legit] goes down.

(because)
   2a) Greg mentioned something to the effect that the "pool" of
participants was those that completed a work-unit in the previous 24 hours;
as the number of people "doing the work" increases, the number of units
completed increases BUT [it appears] they are only paying $100 for the
whole lot -- their "cost per unit" drops dramatically...

OTOH: if they paid a $100 prize per 100 units completed, it would be a
little more palatable [there being an upper limit to the number of
participants per prize]  Of course, if this were the case I'd like to
arrange it so that all 100 "participants" for a particular drawing were
myself [i.e., hold onto the results until ready to dump 100 "results" back
into the system at once...] but I imagine this is "not possible..." :)

Tom

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