On Thu, 13 Sep 2007 15:28:49 GMT, Larry Dighera wrote in :

Do you think it's reasonable for Amazon to _require_ participants (who
already have an Amazon account or not) in the search for Fossett to
agree to payment terms before Amazon will permit them volunteer to
help?

Short answer: yes.

Explanation: The Mechanical Turk is something Amazon runs as a
business.

It happens to be useful for distributing a few hundred thousand
images to volunteers to look at.

I read over the agreement and learned about the Mechanical Turk
before signing the agreement.

It's just boilerplate associated with the already-existing
MT business that friends of Fossett are using to do the
search. It's no more life-threatening than hundreds, if not
thousands, of boilerplate agreements that I've signed in the
24 years I've been using computers.

I've done 720 images so far, working a few minutes here and
there. I don't have any great hope that this will find Fossett,
but I don't mind pitching in from time to time anyway.
My guess is that the resolution of the images is going to be
too poor to see a plane nose-down in a forest, crumpled up
against a canyon wall, or crashed-and-burned.

Marty
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