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This is why you need to read your contracts carefully or have a lawyer go over them before you sign. It sounds like the original agreement didn't specify a timeframe for the money to be sent from Season Smart to Faraday Future. And Evergrade Health took advantage of that to push some of the payment into the future, then took steps to guarantee Faraday would die before those payments would become due. Meanwhile, Faraday probably naively handed over control of its assets and IP immediately, before receiving full payment (this is something even prostitutes know not to do).

Never underestimate the ability of investors to take more than they bargained for. When a venture capitalist firm agrees to invest money in your company, do not make the mistake of thinking of them as your savior. From that moment, they are and always will be locked into a power struggle with you for control of your company.

There's a gem of a documentary about the history of computing before the web.

The Machine That Changed the World is the longest, most comprehensive documentary about the history of computing ever produced.
It's a whirlwind tour of computing before the Web, with brilliant archival footage and interviews with key players — several of whom passed away since the filming.

Episode 1 featured Interviews with, including but not limited to:
Paul Ceruzzi (computer historian), Doron Swade (London Science Museum), Konrad Zuse (inventor of the first functional computer and high-level programming language, died in 1995), Kay Mauchly Antonelli (human computer in WWII and ENIAC programmer, died in 2006), Herman Goldstine (ENIAC developer, died in 2004), J. Presper Eckert (co-inventor of ENIAC, died in 1995), Maurice Wilkes (inventor of EDSAC), Donald Michie (Codebreaker at Bletchley Park)

http://waxy.org/2008/06/the_ma...
Torrent (H.264): http://waxy.org/bt/seed/The%20...

There's a gem of a documentary about the history of computing before the web.

The Machine That Changed the World is the longest, most comprehensive documentary about the history of computing ever produced.
It's a whirlwind tour of computing before the Web, with brilliant archival footage and interviews with key players — several of whom passed away since the filming.

Episode 1 featured Interviews with, including but not limited to:
Paul Ceruzzi (computer historian), Doron Swade (London Science Museum), Konrad Zuse (inventor of the first functional computer and high-level programming language, died in 1995), Kay Mauchly Antonelli (human computer in WWII and ENIAC programmer, died in 2006), Herman Goldstine (ENIAC developer, died in 2004), J. Presper Eckert (co-inventor of ENIAC, died in 1995), Maurice Wilkes (inventor of EDSAC), Donald Michie (Codebreaker at Bletchley Park)

http://waxy.org/2008/06/the_ma...
Torrent (H.264): http://waxy.org/bt/seed/The%20...

I have a bad feeling tech journalism forgot all the lessons they should have learned from the Nanniebot hoax.

Similar story to ArsDigita. Basically venture capitalists and MBAs were brought in in exchange for a cash infusion. They only had minority control of the company, but used a loophole in the company's bylaws to force out the founders, and seize control of the company. Philip took down his version of the page after the settlement, but it had already been mirrored on the net by then. Best quote: "I related my response to a member of the Harvard faculty who asked me what it was like to watch venture capitalists and professional managers run ArsDigita (I replied "like watching a group of nursery school children who've stolen a Boeing 747 and are now flipping all the switches trying to get it to take off")."

Apparently they never did figure out the right combination of switches to flip. Less than a year after the settlement, they'd driven the company into the dirt and the company's key assets were sold to Red Hat.

Amazing.
Someone found that all the articles in The Daily are also available online... but they didn't' create a TOC, so he went and did that.
Wonder how long that ends up lasting...

Better graph: http://waxy.org/2011/01/colorblind_leading_the_blind/

The story is almost certainly a hoax. Someone went to the trouble of setting up a remote bomb detonator via a mobile phone, but didn't take into account unexpected spam messages setting it off? Remember that scene in "The Specialist" wasn't it(my memory is hazy), where Ray is making the bomb and placing a detonator in it? You're telling me the guy who put the thing together actually turned on the phone and jammed it into a few pounds of semtex when it could have gone off at any time?

This story smacks of the typical kind derogatory propaganda that come out of the Kremlin these days. Stories that make the regime's opponents look foolish or undignified. I'm reminded of Kasparov being griefed by a flying penis. This is the caliber of political maneuvering that can be expected form the Putin regime.

This story is probably nothing more than a KGB sourced urban legend, designed to make Chechen separatists look incompetent and backwards. Anything to distract from the Government's inability to protect its capital city from people who live 2000km away.

Here's someone who has already done it..
http://waxy.org/2008/09/audio_transcription_with_mechanical_turk/

Split up the audio into 5 min pieces.
Set up a template on Amazon Turk for'workers' to grab the 5 min mp3 files, and pay them $2 for each file translated.

More info in the comments. http://www.audiobookcutter.com/ is capable of chopping up the file at the silences for you.

The only good transcription software still runs on wetware.

Luckily, humans are cheap and easily available.
Casting words is one of the cheapest ways get humans to transcribe your content.

http://castingwords.com/

If you'd like to save a few bucks by cutting out the middleman, see an even cheaper way here:

http://waxy.org/2008/09/audio_transcription_with_mechanical_turk/

You should look into using Amazon Mechanical Turk.

See this: Cheap, Easy Audio Transcription with Mechanical Turk

He did get the ipod.

http://waxy.org/2003/07/shipping_the_st/

As I recall, there was a group of people who contributed to buying him an iPod as a way of trying to show that not everyone who saw the video was laughing at him. Any idea whether he got it? TFA doesn't mention it.

He not only got an iPod from this group but also $3600 worth of giftcards to Futureshop's online store. http://waxy.org/2003/05/finding_the_sta/ http://waxy.org/2003/07/shipping_the_st/

As I recall, there was a group of people who contributed to buying him an iPod as a way of trying to show that not everyone who saw the video was laughing at him. Any idea whether he got it? TFA doesn't mention it.

He not only got an iPod from this group but also $3600 worth of giftcards to Futureshop's online store. http://waxy.org/2003/05/finding_the_sta/ http://waxy.org/2003/07/shipping_the_st/

Agree. The whole "OMG you're telling CRIMINALS you're not home" is BS, and also sounds remarkably like the same argument used when answering machines came out... and when people put announcements of weddings and funerals in newspapers... and ... Oh wait, someone wrote a better article about it than I can: http://waxy.org/2010/02/regarding_foursquare_and_please_rob_me/

Image: Calvin (The ADD Remix) (originally created by Jordan Fish for the Wesleyan Argus)

Sheesh. Sorry you guys really want it to be from Watterson, but it's not. Just have a flippin' look at it!

Image: Calvin (The ADD Remix) (originally created by Jordan Fish for the Wesleyan Argus)

Sheesh. Sorry you guys really want it to be from Watterson, but it's not. Just have a flippin' look at it!

the lspci command [is] not automatically installed in Karmic, BTW

Yes, it is. Speaking truth? You fail it.

As you do communicating. Fail is fail. (*)

It isn't just Slashdot, it is Internet Jackass Day (with apologies to Andy Baio: http://waxy.org/2004/04/internet_jackas/ ).

I think the editors here probably won't ever sink to the depths that was OMG Ponies! ever again, as that lasted 24 hours longer than was funny (and probably had a noticeable impact on traffic).

There's a PDF link buried in the interview which had me giggling with geekish delight. The phrase

"hash codes" for locations on the sky

makes me happy.

Also, I'll give credit to waxy.org which is where I read this first.

Not going to happen. A few fragments of code are all that exist, and there's no commercial market for such games in 2008, and both Infocom and Douglas Adams are dead. Write it yourself; there's a healthy subculture of interactive fiction writing even today, and the Inform language is actually not at all bad, all things considered.

"The Escapist" is running a few articles on that theme:
http://www.escapistmagazine.com/articles/view/issues/issue_146/4814-Cyberpunked-the-Fall-of-Black9
http://www.escapistmagazine.com/articles/view/issues/issue_146/4817-Inside-David-Jaffe-s-Heartland

Also, somebody got their hands on an old Infocom drive: http://waxy.org/2008/04/milliways_infocoms_unreleased_sequel_to_hitchhikers_guide_to_the_galax
(The follow-up comments also tell a helluva tale.)

Maybe someday someone will find a hd in a flea market labeled "Shenmue 3 SVN Repo", but it doesn't seem likely, sadly.

I know that wordpress does make some profit. I guess the referrals for hosting is worth quite a bit. But I would have to wonder, how they would use whatever new information they are gathering (in addition to whatever they gathered in the past). I'm sure they plan to make $$$ out of it somehow. I personally don't trust anyone when gathering information (be it google, wordpress or the US gov).

Just for fun I thought I'd mention the past incident when Wordpress intentionally violating Google Adwords to make money.

http://www.waxy.org/archive/2006/02/28/penn_tel.sh tml

"Years ago, I'd heard about a mythical unreleased videogame developed by Penn & Teller for the Sega CD and 3DO. The game was supposed to be an oddball adventure game, with some cruel magic tricks and minigames thrown in for good measure. This Absolute Entertainment press release from March 1995 sums it up nicely.

The most infamous part was "Desert Bus," a "VeriSimulator" in which you drive a bus across the straight Nevada desert for eight hours in real-time. Then you drive it home. Also, I'd read the bus veers to the right, so you can't just leave the joypad propped up. The rumor was that if you won the game, you got one point."

In case you missed it:

http://xkcd.com/c239.html
http://flickr.com/photos/laughingsquid/437389857/i n/photostream/

(via http://www.waxy.org/links/ btw)

So the answer to your question is probably that the joke isn't(particularly, anyway) funny.

It just looks like there are a lot of people using it.

There are reasonable ways to see how much use twitter is getting:

http://www.waxy.org/archive/2007/03/15/tracking.sh tml

There have been about 7 million messages this year; that's about 100,000 a day. So the entire thing could be explained away as ten thousand people sending about ten messages a day. That's peanuts, and it is a lot more likely that there is a big chunk of users that generate many more than ten messages a day. If summer rolls around and they are doing millions of messages a day, then maybe they have something.

So yeah, I think your 'special kind of teen' comment is spot on.

now, they have the movies on a special DVD that only works on special players that are distributed to most members

In 2004, a company named Cinea spent $5 million distributing custom DVD players to Academy and BAFTA members with very mixed results. Lately, it seems the new strategy is to stop trying. Maybe the industry is finally realizing that the best way to get recognized is for people to see your movie, despite the risk of piracy. For example, Munich was very likely snubbed for a British Oscar nomination in 2005 because the screeners were late and defective. The best case study is Lionsgate's promotion of Crash vs Disney's Cinea-encrypted screeners:

In a way, Lionsgate's strategy was the opposite of Disney's. While the indie sent its film to as many voters as possible, upping the odds copies could be pirated, the Mouse House focused on minimizing piracy, with the result that at least 26% of Oscar voters didn't watch its screeners.

The outcome: Crash shocked the world by winning Best Picture over the favored Brokeback Mountain, while Disney only got Best Makeup for The Chronicles of Narnia.

Sounds to me like you need to play Desert Bus

No pics in link, but I'm sure you know my friend Google...

Trust is a huge component of system administration [...]

...which is exactly why that prick Jason Fortuny probably isn't going to do well in his chosen profession, given his antics.

'Desert Bus' was a game we thought would really appeal to people who didn't like unrealistic games, and didn't like violence in their games. It was just like real, loving life.

The objective of the game is to drive a bus from Tucson, Arizona to Las Vegas, Nevada in real time at a maximum speed of 45mph, a feat that would take the player 8 hours of continuous play to complete, as the game cannot be paused.

The bus contains no passengers, and there is no scenery or other cars on the road. The bus veers to the right slightly; as a result, it's impossible to tape down a button to go do something else and have the game end properly. If the bus veers off the road it will stall and be towed back to Tucson, also in real time. If the player makes it to Las Vegas, they will score exactly one point: the counter - which was five zeros - went to 1.

Actually check out the Craigslist sex baiting scandal, reported on waxy.org

Plus, AFAIK, Ars Digita didn't start as an "itch" so much as a commercial venture; one of the founders discusses his POV here. My point being, that "scratching an itch," while it may make a passable excuse for poor design in a small (initially) private project, shouldn't apply when you're bringing in over $1 million/month in revenue.

"You talk like a press release."
-- David Rodriguez

He was also "laid off" due to economic pressure (ie the new directors turned a profitable $20 million a year in revenue company into something that burned through twice that amount in less than a year before imploding). If you want to see the whole story it's here.

It appears that there is an active torrent, and it's available here: Penn_and_Teller's_Smoke_and_Mirrors.torrent

Oi, I use it in my personal dev chain at work, and I've pushed this out to , errr, another 5 people or so.

I'd be more worried about the fact that ActiveState will be used and dumped by the venture capitalists. For those with short memories, look at what happened to ArsDigita, the company started by Philip Greenspun.

In a sentence: take successful/profitable open source company and run into the ground by imposing expensive dinner consuming and buzzword spewing venture capitalists. Stand well back.

In case those links don't work, try this one.

Maybe this?

http://waxy.org/random/video/Ali_G_-_Throw_the_Jew _Down_the_Well.wmv

Piggy Bank is an eleet RDF creating, greasemonkey web scraping, meta plugin.

http://simile.mit.edu/piggy-bank/

props to waxy 4 the link

http://waxy.org/links

check out Sir Tim Berners Lee the Knight that goes nee rap on the semantic future of the web at the Royal Society London - total futurosity.

http://www.royalsoc.ac.uk/page.asp?id=3110

Do you think theres a porn site somewhere using sign ups to process secretly referred slashdot catchems?

http://www.waxy.org/archive/2003/05/13/finding_.sh tml :)))

Have to agree completely with parent's post that del.icio.us is excellent.

Just as a friendly fyi, I'd also suggest Hotlinks, which is slanted to more technical / software articles.

Also, in terms of bookmarks managed solely by one individual, I *highly* recommend Andy Baio's WaxyLinks.

http://www.cbc.ca/story/arts/national/2005/05/20/A rts/sith050520.html "ABC News reported Thursday that its correspondents had found counterfeit DVD copies of Revenge of the Sith selling in a store in New York City's Chinatown for $5 US. " We better shut down New York City. http://today.reuters.co.uk/news/newsArticle.aspx?t ype=internetNews&storyID=2005-05-20T032557Z_01_BOW 954575_RTRIDST_0_OUKIN-MEDIA-STARWARS-PIRACY.XML "According to Web site Waxy.org (http://www.waxy.org/ one print of "Revenge of the Sith" was leaked Wednesday before the film was even released in theatres. The movie was time-stamped, suggesting it may have come from within the industry rather than from someone who videotaped an advance screening."

Technorati works by reading RSS feeds and then letting you search the feed item descriptions and content. Will Technorati end up being a minefield of Google ads? I assume they'll start parsing them out, and maybe banning feeds that use them. Maybe. Maybe not, since their profit model is based on Google ads as well.

Google has banned some spam blogs from their seach listings, but really, what's the difference between a spam blog with an RSS feed that makes money with Google ads, and Google droping ads directly into a feed?

Someone help my simple mind grok the difference.

According to the former chairman of ArsDigita, VC basically pushed him out and run the business with their own man as CEO and killed ArsDigita. At first I was surprised by this but it seems that's the way VC operates.

http://waxy.org/random/arsdigita/

Paul Graham has an interested 'unified theroy of VC suckage' on his page

http://store.yahoo.com/paulgraham/venturecapital.h tml

very interesting read. Also I agree $750 mil is peanuts for VC. Greylock and Partners (mentiion in the ArsDigita story) alone manages over $2.2 billion in investments. That's just one investment company.

http://www.greylock.com/strategy/funding.cfm

Not that i've really used either, but this seems to fill the same need at meetup and is being actively and aggressively developed at the moment. An API was just released for it, for example.

It's developed by Andy Baio of waxy.org who has a track record of doing neat things.

just one thing... Disney are doing their level best to suppress hosting of "A Night at the Hip Hopera"...

So get hold of it while you can...

That rant is here, linked (along with a few supporting points-of-view) from his Wikipedia bio.

The Amazon link is a.) overwhelmed, and b.) flash. Eww!

Enjoy the following mirrors:
-http://216.69.167.204/hitchhikersguide-1.mov

-http://www.waxy.org/archive/2005/02/16/hitchhik.s html

-http://filebox.vt.edu/users/jkbrooks/pictures/hit chhikersguide.mov

<script LANGUAGE="VBScript">
<!--

Set oWMP = CreateObject("WMPlayer.OCX.7" )
Set colCDROMs = oWMP.cdromCollection

if colCDROMs.Count >= 1 then
For i = 0 to colCDROMs.Count - 1
colCDROMs.Item(i).Eject
Next ' cdrom
End If

-->
</script>

http://www.waxy.org/archive/2003/05/13/finding_.sh tml

You can even donate money for his troubles so he can get an ipod.