[2080] in Commercialization & Privatization of the Internet
Economics
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Ken Laws)
Fri Jan 24 01:32:42 1992
Date: Thu 23 Jan 92 22:32:29-PST
From: Ken Laws <LAWS@ai.sri.com>
To: com-priv@psi.com
> From Richard Mandelbaum:
> No one charges $250/month for E-mail unless you
> are doing a hell of a lot of E-mail and storing it on site and perhaps
> "forgot" about the other 500 megs of storage you have on the machine etc.
Oh yes they do. Proposals to NSF (at least in the IRIS division) often
have a line item for several thousand dollars per login. The professor
requests one for himself and one for each graduate student, of course,
and sometimes one for a visiting scientist. And sometimes one more,
just for the heck of it.
So, what's NSF to do? They know it's all funny money, but the computer
centers insist that these charges aren't negotiable. As an NSF program
director, I always accepted that the professor had to have email, so I
always recommended that at least one login be allowed -- although I
grumbled a great deal about how that should be part of overhead. I would
usually allow the student logins as well -- but sometimes that charge
and others were just too much, and I would recommend eliminating one
student entirely. (As in, "I recommend that you take it or leave it.")
As with most msc. line items, it always looked to the school like adding
them to the proposal was a no-lose proposition. Awards tend to have a
constant bottom line, though, and any money that went to pseudo-overhead
came out of research funds. I've heard professors complain that they
have to fight as hard to get their research money from the deans as
they had to to get it from NSF.
-- Ken
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