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When I was a teen I was mainly interested in Adventure Game Toolkit and before that, Player-Missile Graphics. Of course, that brings up a point, how do you get a child interested in programming? In my case, I had my own computer (well, I mostly shared it with my Dad, which occasionally led to arguing) and a supply of cool computer hobbyist magazines. So, if I were going to get a kid interested in programming, the first think I'd do is get him a cheap, linux netbook and the next thing would be a magazine subscription. Hmm, but what magazine? Well, before it got axed, I like Maximum Linux, but there seem to still be a few good Linux magazines around. Oh, someone is probably thinking, at this point, why Linux? Why not Windows? Mainly because Linux is an OS aimed at programmers and Windows is aimed at non-programmers. There are a lot of free tools for both, ymmv.

The Final Value Fee for these sale amounts would increase as shown:

High Bid - Old Fee - New Fee - Increase
$10.00 - $0.53 - $0.80 - 51%
$20.00 - $1.05 - $1.60 - 52%
$25.00 - $1.31 - $2.00 - 53%
$50.00 - $2.00 - $3.25 - 63%
$100.00 - $3.38 - $5.75 - 70%
$500.00 - $14.38 - $25.75 - 79%
$1,000.00 - $28.13 - $50.75 - 80%

The total eBay fees (minimum insertion fee + computed final value fee) for these sale amounts would increase as shown:

High Bid - Old Fee - New Fee - Increase
$10.00 - $0.83 - $1.10 - 33%
$20.00 - $1.35 - $1.90 - 41%
$25.00 - $1.61 - $2.30 - 43%
$50.00 - $2.30 - $3.55 - 54%
$100.00 - $3.68 - $6.05 - 64%
$500.00 - $14.68 - $26.05 - 77%
$1,000.00 - $28.43 - $51.05 - 80%

http://www.markwelch.com/perspective/ebay-fees.htm

For the extremely lazy, here are the links from the article.
Full text of law
Simplified version

Sorry, but NO. This is great in theory, but the problem is that spam shifts all costs to the victim, and the victim cannot be forced to accept unlimited costs for creation of a complex system that insures due process and appeals.

My personal mail server receives many THOUSANDS of mail delivery attempts per day, all of which come to me (or nobody). Approximately 98% of these are spam, and more than 90% are forged in multiple ways (fake headers, fake server names, invalid return addresses, and frequently forged to show MY server name as the sender).

A week ago, I turned off my server-side filtering and collected several hundred spam emails in about an hour, before re-activating the filtering.

I spend approximately 15 minutes per day managing my spam filters (mostly adding new IP addresses and domains to the filters). Whenever I skip this management for a few days, my incoming spam volume rises substantially (in other words, if I don't close the door, dozens of spams per day come into my email client through some of the doors I didn't close).

Other people have irrational filters, too. AT&T, for example, has blocked all email that contains "markwelch" as part of the source address (hence all email from my servers is refused). I'm not sure why -- it might be because I've send hundreds of spam complaints to ATT.com, or it might be because so much spam has been forged with my domain name faked as the sender ("joe jobs"). But I don't dispute AT&T's right to do this, nor do I demand that AT&T provide me with a response or explanation or oppportunity to be heard. It sucks, but responding to spam is a triage activity, you must skip over some of the complex problems and try to manage the ones you know you can.

I do not currently use any third-party RBL or listing service; I manage my own filters. It's expensive and annoying, but I do this so that I can manage the process of filtering so that I don't constantly block my friends who are stuck with ISPs who are on some other blocklists.

I periodically post my complete filter list at: http://www.MarkWelch.com/Welch_Filters.htm so that people who can't reach me, can check to see if their IP address or domain has been blocked on my end.

From http://www.markwelch.com/faxlaw.htm (referencing 47USC227):
Under United States law, it is unlawful "to use any telephone facsimile machine, computer, or other device to send an unsolicited advertisement" to any "equipment which has the capacity (A) to transcribe text or images (or both) from an electronic signal received over a regular telephone line onto paper." The law allows individuals to sue the sender of such illegal "junk fax" or (arguably) "junk email" for $500 per copy. Most states will permit such actions to be filed in Small Claims Court.

Speaking of which, I hated the 8080Xt Vendex Headstart. It was vastly inferior to my Atari 800...

The stated reason for reducing the pricing was because the extra $250 for a "prepaid lifetime subscription" was reducing sales (especially since the product's remaining lifetime seems likely to be substantially less than a year), so they were going to switch to a monthly subscription model. Instead, they are just playing a "hide the fee" game, hoping that idiots who get the box home will agree to pay another $250 instead of returning the box.

If the fee is properly disclosed (to avoid lawsuits), then nobody will buy this version if they didn't buy the prior version, since the features are unchanged and the net price is unchanged. But we all know that the fee will not be properly disclosed, so there will be many returns and there will be lawsuits by various consumer groups and state AGs, which may be simply part of ReplayTV's "publicity" strategy.

And as noted, the deal is basically that if the company folds, the box can self-destruct and you have nothing, period, for your $650.

In April, I wrote an essay chronicling my efforts to buy a PVR, and nothing has changed since then. Nobody sells PVR technology to consumers, period. For those who are willing to do a lot of "do it yourself" work, and who trust that the companies will "do the right thing" despite the lack of any legal obligation to provide service, it is technically possible to get PVR technology working.

I would gladly pay $300 to $500 for something like a TiVo or ReplayTV, plus $10 to $15 per month for programming data, if I thought I could get an actual service that would last for a year or more. I am absolutely unconvinced that any company can or will provide service for a year.

I think Wallace may have deliberately sent me spam in order to provoke me -- he knew I'd complain since he was breaching his earlier promise to block my email addresses after earlier complaints. By provoking me to complain, he could claim a "victim" role, by falsely stating that I had "asked" to receive the emails and then unfairly complained and caused his business to lose its only internet connection (every other ISP and backbone provider had blacklisted him years earlier).

Spanford Wallace filed his suit in Pennsylvania (despite lack of jurisdiction) because he knew I'd have to hire an attorney there and spend thousands of dollars in legal fees and court costs to dismiss the suit. He knew the suit would be dismissed for lack of jurisdiction, and he chose not to sue me in California because he knew that California has a SLAPP statute that would have permitted me to collect attorneys' fees and damages (Pennsylvania didn't have a SLAPP statute).

The spammers' only goals in filing lawsuits are to gain "unfair advantage" -- adverse publicity for the opponent, and deliberate choice of an inconvenient and expensive forum.

It worked for Wallace: I stopped making spam complaints for many months because I was so distracted by the lawsuit. And he also deterred others from reporting spam complaints, by loudly and publicly announcing that he (and other spammers) would not hesitate to deliberately abuse the court system in order to punish honest people who make valid complaints.

Wallace's publicity campaign was transparent: he decided to file the lawsuit one day after I appeared on CNBC regarding another consumer advocacy issue; he wanted to "piggy-back" by suing a well-known consumer advocate. He posted a copy of the lawsuit on his web site and emailed dozens of reporters just minutes after the complaint was filed (of course, I learned of the suit only when the reporters called me, and since I couldn't respond to a suit I hadn't seen, Wallace's false and malicious claims were republished as if they were true -- with no follow-up when the suit was abandoned and dismissed several months later.

Although Wallace's suit was filed in Pennsylvania despite the absence of jurisdiction, I was forced to spend $5,000 to hire a Philadelphia attorney to prepare and file a motion to dismiss (I chose an attorney who had previously obtained a judgment against Wallace). As soon as we filed the motion to dismiss, Wallace simply abandoned the lawsuit (he submitted papers to the court claiming that a "settlement had been reached," though there was no settlement.

The only good news is that I haven't heard from him since then, but of course the bad news is that he drained $5,000 of my money and a lot of my time, and simultaneously scared off someone interested in buying a web site I owned (the offer to buy my business for $350,000 was withdrawn the day after the suit was filed, and five months later I sold the business to another buyer for $175,000).

Wallace also successfully deterred many spam complaints by proving his continued willingness to abuse court processes for personal gain.)

I assume that the spammer in the current case filed a suit in the hopes of driving up others' costs and extorting a settlement.

Eh? I panned a lot of products, both as a reviewer for magazines (including InfoWorld during my first year of law school from 1986-87) and later as a syndicated columnist (a negative review is, of course, so much more fun to write than a positive review, see my recent work at http://www.MarkWelch.com/perspective/), but I can't recall ever reviewing any "Greeting Card" programs that I can recall. The only possibility I can think of is that my co-author may have included your product in one of our "pre-holiday" columns (this would have been the "Law Office Technology Review" column that was syndicated to legal newspapers, which I co-authored with Barry Bayer from 1987-90).

Surprise: you can't buy them. ReplayTV is not carried in any store, and your only option is to mail-order it at a price of $700 for a 30-hour machine that requires a broadband connection to use.

By comparison, TiVo is promoting a $400 box that stores 60 hours of programs, but it lacks a commercial-skip or even a skip-30-seconds button, and it adds that $13-per-month subscription. And TiVo made the odd decision to sign an exclusive deal with Best Buy, but Best Buy won't show the unit "in use" -- all you can do is watch a canned infomercial on a fuzzy TV screen -- and Best Buy buries the thing mid-aisle (and the topper is that it's not actually in stock).

Finally, there's UltimateTV, which requires a DirecTV satellite and subscription ($48 plus tax per month is the minimum subcription, including the $32 base price, plus $6 more for local channels, plus $10 per month for the UltimateTV service). I was attracted to the $199 RCA version. Again, you can't actually see it in use -- not at Best Buy (again, you can watch a fuzzy infomercial), nor at Radio Shack (where it's not in stock anyway), nor at Circuit City (also out of stock). Call and ask UltimateTV and they'll give you a long list of other retail stores (including Wal-Mart) -- none of which actually sell UltimateTV. The most amusing call was to the Sony store at the Sony Metreon center in San Francisco -- they have never even heard of the Sony UltimateTV unit.

To their credit, Good Guys had an RCA UltimateTV unit on display, connected to a satellite and able to record two channels at once and display the (limited) picture-in-picture mode. After a few minutes, a clerk tracked down the remote control. After a few minutes, I was impressed enough to say "okay, I'll buy it." Surprise: it's not in stock, and the store has no idea when it will be back in stock.

Best Buy had a stack of units in stock (all resealed-opened boxes), but when I tried to buy one, they announced that I'd have to sign a "commitment agreement" binding myself to a minimum one year of service. Since their in-store price tags and brochures made no mention of this $400 "extra," I objected and refused to sign, and they refused to sell me the unit at ANY price. (Yeah, I could sue them since their practice is illegal, like so many other Best Buy bait-and-switch tactics -- but it's not worth the effort).

See also http://www.markwelch.com/perspective/pvr.htm (I wrote that commentary on Sunday, before I managed to see the UltimateTV at The Good Guys, and before I tried to buy it at Best Buy).

That is the biggest load of bullshit I've ever heard.

Somehow, according to your spam-happy ass, its the CUSTOMERS who are making their costs higher, not the SPAMMERS?

The answer is yes, definitely. A well-optimized campaign of paid search terms at Overture (formerly GoTo.com), can result in huge increases in relevant traffic and sales.

Many search engines, including Google, don't provide relevant information because they are bloated with spam (spoofed web pages, often for porn sites) and they also can't keep up with new submissions (so relevant content never gets indexed). Google certainly remains the best place to find certain types of information, but if you use Google to search for a specific consumer product, you'll get mostly garbage.

In late 2000, I designed the paid-search strategy for MovieGoods.com, which sells movie posters. We submitted about 450,000 unique search terms (including several variations for each actor/actress name, director, movie title, and movie theme), and GoTo.com approved about 27,000 of them (they won't let you buy a search term unless their records show that it has been searched more than 10 times in the past 90 days).

Of course, for a company like MovieGoods, a huge portion of traffic comes from people who search for simple terms like "movie poster" (the top ten search terms probably drive 60% of the GoTo/Overture-sourced traffic). But the other 25,000 search terms (like "Fellowship of the Ring movie poster" or "Antonio Banderas posters") drive a lot of sales, and usually at a very low cost.

For a merchant like MovieGoods, the key is to carefully track the performance of each search term: I determined how many dollars of sales were generated by each search phrase, and how much we spent, and we achieved a simple balance: for every $1 we spent at GoTo/Overture, we generated $6 in sales.

And consumers also benefitted by finding exactly what they were looking for. Yes, Overture does allow some off-topic bidding, but they are trying to crack down on it so that only genuinely responsive links come up in the paid listings.

Of course, some consumers ignore the paid results on search engines (including Google, which does sell top-of-list placement and right-margin AdWords, so they are NOT so much holier than the others). But like so many "bad things" on the internet, paid results work for the merchants and often for the consumer.

There are some interesting issues: for example, if I search for "MovieGoods" and a competitor bids for the #1 position for that term, there are some real concerns. There have even been lawsuits over this issue (really not much different, legally, than the "Meta Keyword" disputes).

Of course, if the result said "Click Here for MovieGoods" and instead the consumer is misdirected to a competitor (or to a porn site), then it's just not right, but I haven't seen much of this type of abuse (and Overture prohibits it, though as you'd expect they don't check all listings as carefully as some folks would like).

Also, every major search engine (including Yahoo, Alta Vista, Google, Lycos, and more) is pretty clear at distinguishing the "paid" results from the regular results. Usually the paid listings are in a different font style or size, bold or not, indented differently, or boxed to stand apart from other results.

Finally, note that on many search engines, there are multiple paid-placement opportunities. For example, on Yahoo, there are pay-per-click results from Overture, then there are paid "sponsored links," and then there are the "most popular links" which generally are the paid sponsors since the sponsor links are shown first and thus get clicked most often. On Google, there are left-margin "AdWords" as well as top-of-list placements. And everybody sells banner ads and often buttons also.

These days, most of my time is spent on designing "cost-effective marketing" campaigns, with strong emphasis on optimizing paid-search-engine placements, affiliate programs, and of course traditional search-engine-optimization strategies.

The key is that I can achieve that $5 return on every dollar spent on these strategies, but banner ads and other types of advertising rarely return even $2 in sales for every dollar spent (and often the return is pennies on the dollar). That explains why banner ad rates have plummetted so far, so fast. And it explains why the content-versus-advertising borders are getting fuzzier.

(Here on Slashdot, people complain all the time about those FatBrain links in book reviews, which will vanish in a day or two since B&N acquired FatBrain and is discontinuing the generous FatBrain affiliate program.)

-- Mark J. Welch, Internet Performance Marketing Consultant
-- http://www.MarkWelch.com/consult.htm

What's really interesting, is that the authors succeeded in persuading me that the evil villains were responsible for destroying Value America -- but I easily concluded that the authors were more evil, and more responsible, than those they blamed.

The authors spent a lot of time and energy blaming the people they hired for problems, and provide just enough detail to prove that those folks were incompetent fools. But the authors deliberately (almost artfully) omit the key information: they blame their "opponents" for buying millions of dollars of newspaper advertising, but they started the campaign and apparently spent even more. They fault their opponents for scheming and lying, but reveal that the authors were also lying and scheming even earlier.

I have written and posted a lengthy review of the book at http://www.markwelch.com/perspective/good_and_evil .htm.

If anyone cares (and I'm sure most do not care), I wrote a review of Dot.Bomb, posted at http://www.markwelch.com/perspective/dot_bomb.htm.

I agree that "this book actually stands a good chance of being the standard history of the dotcom boom-and-bust." That's why I was upset enough to write a review: I expected a "competent journalist's account," but what I got was a book riddled with factual errors -- mistakes that future readers might accept as true and repeat. I also don't think Cassidy really "tied it all together," other than by putting events on pages that all lie within the same binding. He offers no insight, no conclusions, and as I wrote, no real "Con" nor any actual blame for anyone. I think 'history' would be better served by a bound set of internet-boom-and-bust articles from Forbes magazine, or Fortune, or Business Week, since at least the mistakes in a magazine can often be forgiven due to tight deadlines. (FYI, the full, unedited text of this review appears at my own site at http://www.markwelch.com/perspective/dotcon.htm.)

As I've often seen proclaimed on the internet, unsolicited faxes are illegal and can earn you some cash. Might be worth looking into.

I wonder if the EFF also believes that junk faxes should be legal--even though the anti-junk-fax law was upheld as constitutional when challenged on First Amendment grounds.

Anyone remember the Adventure Game Toolkit? All the coding was done with numerical indices (ie, you told the compiler that ROOM 4 exited NORTH to ROOM 7) and a lot of the parser and things were hardcoded, but it was loads of fun. I actually had a significant portion of a game written, but then I switched to the incredibly superior Inform and my procrastinating habits finally caught up with me. I do intend to complete a game at some point though...

As someone already mentioned, 12000 unique page views per month isn't very much at all. It's probably not enough to attract private advertisers most likely. What you can do with smaller sites is to use one of the agencies (like Burst Media). Mark Welch has put together a nice site with banner ad resources. Check it out and you should be able to find something even for a small site. Please note that even with a $5 CPM (Cost per thousand page views) which is pretty average, your site would only earn $60 per month.