[ale] OT: Well it is going to hit the list sooner or later.

[Jeff Hubbs]

On Mon, 2004-08-02 at 06:18, Geoffrey wrote:
> Jeff Hubbs wrote:
> > First, I don't think that the equation the guy makes about his boss
> > "stealing" is valid.  It's a rhetorical trick that I don't buy into;
> > what the boss does is no more stealing in any real material sense than
> > if he was sitting in his chair staring out the window.
> 
> If we want to take this to the extreme, there is a difference.  Network 
> resources and system resources are being taken up by playing the game 
> and researching stocks.  He is stealing these resources.

I know and freely admit that there's a lot about my IT sensibilities
that's old-school, but it seems to even me that cycle-based chargeback
was something whose days are LONG gone!

It is true that *some* network and system resources are being taken up,
but we have here both a huge amount of not just available but almost
certainly otherwise unused resources and a very tiny amount of
consumption relative to that resource headroom.  You might argue that
stealing five dollars from a multibillion-dollar corporation is still
stealing, and you'd be right, but dollars aren't *like* cycles and
transferred bytes.  The guy's PC will be sitting there with its clock
cycling away regardless, even if it's just repainting its screen, and
unless their T1, T3, or what have you is 100% maxxed out AND they're
paying by the byte, then maybe you can make the case that his stock
checking delayed some important e-mail by a few milliseconds and cost a
few micropennies.  

If you hold to this line of reasoning that a person's computer and
network/Internet usage equates to some monetary value per cycle or byte
of throughput, then you risk bumping into some absurdities that you
cannot ignore lest you flirt with hypocrisy.  Water *is* billed by unit
volume; someone who compulsively flushes the toilet before sitting down
in the washroom is wasting far more money than the Solitaire-playing,
stock-checking boss.  And, you know, body heat has to be removed by the
building HVAC and that cooling load costs money; come to work with a
fever and you're wasting money.  

You say he is "stealing" these resources.  If he runs some spreadsheet
totals that he really doesn't need to, the CPU has to work extra too; is
there any difference between that and playing Solitaire?  If he surfs to
a Web site that has JPEGs with unnecessarily high resolutions, isn't he
every bit as guilty as if he checked his stocks?  That he might not KNOW
about the high-res JPEGs is irrelevant; the theft of resources is still
the same regardless of intent or lack thereof.

What I'm saying is that you can't provide many many times more
"resources" than people actually need and then chisel people about
"waste" and "theft."

- Jeff