When I launched my site I wanted to give away my programs for free, yet I needed to recoup costs of my web account. My solution: Voluntary payments through PayPal. The results so far: Very good. I've raised enough in 3 months to run my web server for 8-9 months.
I think there are 3 key elements to a successful micopayment system. All of them are pretty common sense items, but here they are:
1. It must be voluntary: I'm not paying any amount to a site I just found before I get to review their content. And I'm very leery of "pay-per-month" sites. I just don't visit them enough to justify the cost. However, a voluntary payment system lets me say "Hey, I really liked your article on DeCSS/Online Security/whatever, here's $5."
2. Custom payments amounts: As another poster mentioned, different people value the same content differently. I might think an article is worth $5, but you might think it's worth $10, or $2, or nothing. So let people choose how much something's worse. (From experience: Sometimes they choose an amount much more than even you thought it was worth! Not that I'm complaining.;-)
3. Must be easy to use: If the system is too complex, noone's going to give anything. I find PayPal to be good, but there's always room for improvement. The more complex the system, the more possible donars will back out before the transaction is complete.
I think what you mean to say is that banner ads can support a site if there are enough page views.
Sorry, but this is just plain wrong. And I know this from personal experience. I used to work at an online magazine called Winmag.com (formally Windows Magazine) which folded in March. We had great content, a "sticky" site (people would come back to us often), and a lot of page views (around 1.6 million a month). However, we weren't making any money from the banner ads we had up. So, CMP (which owns Winmag.com along with Byte.com and a bunch of other publications) folded it.
Ok, maybe if we were getting 1.6 million page views per day we might have broken even, but then we would have been the exception rather than the rule. Banner ads are quite simply ineffective when it comes to generating revenue.
Now, for my own site that I launched soon after Winmag.com's demise, I decided to leave out all banner ads. (Save for one for my fellow ex-Winmaggers which isn't intended to produce revenue.)
Instead, I set up a PayPal account and let people donate what they thought my site's services were worth. In the 2 1/2 months my site's been up, I've collected enough donations to keep my site running for over 9 months.
I honestly think voluntary donations are the way to go for all but the biggest site. As long as you're providing good content/services, people will be willing to donate. (Note: I said donate, not pay. Pay-per-use sites also aren't too successful, with the exception of the porn sites.)
[i]I've seen some of the longer previews for "Shrek" and they look quite a bit more real than any previous movie effort, but there is just so much that still hasn't been captured.[/i]
I read (on AintItCool I think) that they actually had made a more realistic looking princess for Shrek, but that she didn't fit in with the more "fairy-tale" surroundings. So they had to make her look a bit more cartoon-y.
For better hair effects, I'm looking forward to this fall's Monster's Inc. The monster that John Goodman provides the voice of has some of the best hair effects I've seen in awhile. (And this also is a all-CGI "cartoon" film instead of an attempt to make a all-CGI "real-life" film.)
Well, I believe when the patch was first released, it could not be uninstalled. (So if you had to e-mail someone a legitimate VBS/EXE/etc file, you'd have to go through the trouble of renaming it or zipping it up.) Also, it seems to me a bit of an overreaction. Kind of like finding an open door in your house and building a brick wall inside the door frame to keep intruders out. It's much simpler to simply install a deadbolt lock in the door (which lets people through the door only if you let them in).
Actually, there have been many problems with that patch. Besides, it doesn't address the core issue, the scripting features (while possibly very useful) can be used to easily make viruses.
Excuse the blantent plug, but instead of telling users to hack into their Windows registry (not soemthing most users are capable of), I devised a program, Script Sentry, that seizes control of the VBS extension (as well as quite a few others, but only after you approve it of course). This way, when the script is run, Script Sentry opens up, scans the script for possibly malicious code, and then alerts the user.
For example, in a momentary lapse of judgement, I open that "Love Letter" attachment I recieved. Instead of being infected though, Script Sentry alerts me that the "Love Letter" would have deleted files, edited my registry, and accessed Outlook. I tell Script Sentry not to run the script and crisis averted.
Oh, and the program is 100% free (although I have a means for people to "donate" if they feel it's worth the $$$).
I had a similar setup with my site URateIt.com, except that my site was too small for the ad networks. Then I opened up another site (Jason's Toolbox) on the same server dedicated to some applications I wrote. I made them freeware, but put up a Paypal form so people could pay whatever they thought they were worth if they so chose. In the month that the site's been online, I've recieved enough money through Paypal donations to keep my site running for 5 months. (Some people gave as much as $20 for a program that I would have only charged $5 for, had I made it shareware.) I'll need to get a few more months under my belt to see if this is a fluke, but it is promising.
The question of "what is a cirumvention device" is a huge slippery slope in the DCMA.
First a program that circumvents decryption (ala a compiled DeCSS) is a circumvention device.... I can buy that, though I'd argue that that in and of itself shouldn't make compiled DeCSS illegal.
But what if you get uncompiled DeCSS code and compile it for yourself? Well then the source code must be a circumvention device. Along with whatever medium you have it on (be it CD-ROM, floppy disk, or T-Shirt).
But what if you describe a general outline of how to circumvent some encryption. Not source code, but what's commonly known as pseudo-code. This won't compile, but a skilled programmer might be able to translate it into actual source code. Well, then we must make pseudo-code illegal too!
What if you don't use code, but instead just describe in plain sentences how to decrypt something? Now I guess we must make language a cirumvention device as well!
Who needs free speech when speech itself becomes illegal?
Yup, and it's exactly why I added SHS file protection to a freeware program I wrote that helps protect against viruses spread by Windows Scripting Host and ShellScrap Files. (I'm finishing up the next version that adds REG, HTA, Word Doc, Excel, and SHB support as well.) In case anyone's interested, you can download it from http://www.winmag.com/fixes/watchdog/.
I don't think those examples either didn't harm the users sufficiently enough to warrent a breakup or weren't MS's fault entirely.
The ILOVEYOU virus and it's clones were made possible by Microsoft adding the scripting capabilities of Windows Scripting Host to their OS. This is similar to what many flavors of UNIX have. Unfortunately, because of the sheer number of people that use Windows (and Outlook which was needed to spread the virus), the virus caused more damage than a similar Unix or Linux-based virus would. (This is similar to the opt-stated argument that Windows is more vunerable to viruses because there are more viruses written for it. If you were a virus author and you wanted your virus to have the biggest impact, of course you're going to target the biggest OS!) As a side note, there are tools available that will protect users against these viruses. (Including one I wrote called WatchDog which you can download from http://www.winmag.com/fixes/watchdog/.)
The incompatible file formats were indeed a nuisance, but how will breaking up Microsoft fix that? By making an apps company whose biggest source of revenue is from Office upgrades?
Maybe I'm in the minority here, but my home and office systems are shut down every night, not because I'm afraid they'll crash, but because I want to save some $$$ on my electric bill. I have no desire to leave my home computer on when I'm sleeping at night. Realize that servers are another issue, I'm talking about your average home and business user. Most of the crashes I've come across are due to poorly written apps (*cough**cough*Lotus Notes*cough**cough*) or bad hardware drivers. I can't remember the last time I had a purely Windows-related crash. So we should break up Microsoft because some 3rd party company was lazy in their error trapping?
As for people hating Windows, I know some people do, but not everyone. Certainly not me. So the government should step in and break up a company because some customers don't like the product (yet still insist on using it)? Are you punishing Microsoft for marketing so well that people think that they have to use Windows? Maybe while we're at it, we should require all ads to list some competitors?
I agree that some of Microsoft's practices were questionable, but I don't think the consumer harm warrents a breakup.
Or maybe a "Save this ad for later" feature. Then when you log in to the ad system you'd have to option of viewing (and deleteing) your saved ads as well as changing your user preferences.
Just keep generating a supply of stem cells, and build over any failed component.
And what do you do once something is wrong with the person's brain. You can't just rip out a chunk of it and drop in some stem cells. This isn't a "live forever" thing. It's a "possible way to reap the rich medical harvest that stem cells can provide without the annoying ethical questions surrounding fetuses." (Meaning, a lukemia treatment that would have previously needed a fetus' stem cells might now be able to be done with a person's own cells.)
As far as displaying poorly with poorly-written code, well, that's your fault. As for the quirks, I guess that depends on how you use it. For me, netscape has had the fewer quirks. IE will tend to do some pretty random stuff in fixed-width tables.
I've had no problems with IE and tables. NS and percentage-width tables can get funky. And as for "poorly-written" code.... If a page is perfect except for a closing TABLE tag at the end of a page, the browser should be smart enough to know to close out the table (since there's nothing else on the page). IE does this. NS doesn't. (Like I said above, NS 4. I can't speak for NS 6.)
And is it my fault if I use perfectly good, W3C standard CSS2 code which NS4 doesn't display properly? And a response of "then don't use CSS2" doesn't hold water. It's a standard (not some MS-specific tags). They had years to support it. They didn't.
Sorry, but things like CSS2 are W3C standards that NS 4 had years to support but didn't. (NS6 claims to support them, but I haven't had a chance to test it yet.) Meanwhile IE4+ supported them just fine. (Ok, maybe not 100%, more like 90%. But it was better than NS4's 0%.)
As far as designing web pages go, it's a real pain to try to make a page compatible for NS. It's a stickler for 100% perfect code (how many of us has forgotten a closing TR tag that ruins a page in NS). And in many cases, it's quirks can drive you nuts. (Tried tracking down a style-sheet problem once. Two hours later I discovered that NS doesn't like for the first character of a style-sheet to be a number. IE displayed it just fine.)
In spite of all that, my philosophy is: I might develop towards IE users, but I try to make my pages degrade nicely for NS users. NS users might not get the page 100% the way I want it shown (which is the way IE users see it), but they will get a decent readable page.
As far as the guy who's rejecting 25% of his potential site visitors because they aren't using IE, I'd be willing to bet that this type of behavior won't spread to e-commerce sites. No "e-store" in their right mind would turn away 25% of their customers just because their browser wasn't up to par. They might incorporate some whiz-bang new features that only IE users can see. (Same as some of them have features that only people with certain plug-ins can see.) But they'll make sure that people using other browsers can still browse and buy from their store. Either that or they'll lose the business of NS users.
Let's take the case of a site I run (http://www.urateit.com). The site's purpose is allowing readers to review infomercial products. It's not a very high-traffic site, but it costs me around $400 a year to maintain and doesn't supply any income. Advertising wouldn't help at all. (I fall below most ad network's "minimum page view" requirements.) I was toying with adding a "toss a nickel in the jar" PayPal link, but I'm guessing I'd get next to nothing that way either.
As it happens, I run this site with a friend of mine. We split the costs. He's always telling me that I should sell some of the products that we review. But, in my mind, once I do that, the reviews become tainted. I figure journalistic integrity demands that reviewer not have a commercial stake in the reviewed product.
I agree with you wholeheartedly about those who say that sites should find a way to make money without advertising or get off the 'Net. They obviously don't have a site of their own, or only have a free Geocities page. Besides banner ads, the only ways of a site staying afloat, are selling products, or "teaming up" with a big conglomerate that doesn't mind the slow $$$ leak the site represents. Selling products isn't guaranteed (and in some cases can be bad for a site's reputation) and the thought of all web sites being owned by huge companies just makes me shudder. (Imagine if Slashdot were to become a gobbled up by AOL-TIME-WARNER in order to stay afloat.)
I'm of a mind that it should be a NO PARTY system.
Actually, George Washington was deeply opposed to political parties. I think a party affiliation shouldn't be a criteria for voting for a person and it definitely should not be a criteria for how the candidate will vote once their in office. I don't want my representative voting for or against a bill simply because the other members of his party are also. Completely smacks of a peer pressure mentality. Do these people represent the American people or do they represent their party? (Hint: The correct answer shouldn't be "their party" but it usually is.)
...the Founding Fathers were hardly saints...
Good to hear someone who actually thinks the Founding Fathers were just people. They might have put together a system that's worked pretty well, but they weren't perfect. A lot of people today seem to have raised the Founding Fathers to near-godhood. I wouldn't be too surprised to hear of someone opening a "Church of the Founding Fathers."
Re:.. as humans move out in the solar system. Sigh
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Robotic Ants In Space
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Well for a few reasons. First of all experiments in space yield insights into science that can be applied on Earth to improve the quality of life. These so-called "NASA Spinoffs" include Scratch Resistant Lenses, Athletic Shoes, Laser Agioplasty, and better brakes. For a more detailed list you can look at NASA Spinoffs or The NASA Spinoff Database.
Also, if we can manage to make getting to the asteriod belt affordable, there's a HUGE untapped natural resource that could be very useful.
AIDS doesn't just spread from sexual practices, but from intravenous drug use and blood transfusions. However once the blood transfusions path was brought to light, new screening methods kept the HIV infected blood out of the transfusion pool. Reducing the infection rate from intravenous drug use is a bit more tricky. You can educate about using clean needles, but any effort to supply clean needles runs into a big controversy. (The "do we support their habit by supplying them with the needles or encourage them to stop and stand by while they get infected" quandry.)
In it, Moses is dictating the Torah to Aaron. He starts out "Fifteen Billion years ago there was a big bang and...". Aaron interrupts him and tells him that they don't have enough papyrus to write down 15 billion years of history. They keep whittling it down until they get to just 7 days.
"The week you spend playing Bard's Tale is one week of delayed revenues for Ultima 2001 Pro Special Gold Edition."
So by the same logic, if I happen to have a legal copy of "Bard's Tale" on my system, then playing that for a week is robbing the poor software companies of money because I'm not running out to the store to buy the new "Ultima 2001 Pro Special Gold Edition?" Sorry, but I just don't buy it. If we accept that then we might as well let software companies print "you can play this for X years and then you must delete it" clauses onto their boxes.
I think software companies are ignoring a potential here. Say they re-release a classic 1980's game of theirs as "classic-ware" (to coin a new term). You would get the software for free and could distribute it to all your friends. The catch would be that it contain a built-in ad for either a similar new game of theirs or an updated version of the classic one you'd be about to play. (Kind of a "if-you-like-this-try-this-one" message.)
They could write off any potential "lost sales" as advertising expenses. I know I wouldn't really mind a two second ad (if tastefully done) in return for a legal, free re-release of my favorite classic game.
That got me to thinking. Back when I reviewed shareware for Windows Magazine, I came upon an interesting program whose only purpose was to make a HTML page with randomly generated false e-mail addresses.
One way spammers compile their e-mail address lists is to troll Web pages and pick up as many e-mail addresses as they can. By making one of these "Spam Bait" pages, and linking to it from a main page, you'd poison the spammer's database with nonworking random e-mail addresses. Of course this was a Windows-only binary and the web page has, over the course of time, vanished. So I've recreated the functionality in a Perl Script.
Some notes before I give you the code: I made and tested this script on a Windows 2000 machine. Some tweaking will, no doubt, need to be done for this to run on Linux or other platforms. I'm sure there are plenty of people here who can do that. (Unfortunately, I don't have access to a Linux machine right now.) Also, it occurred to me that you could make this into a CGI Perl script that, on every load, would give a new set of random addresses. (So spammers might think they hit a treasure-trove of e-mails.;-) ) I'll leave that to someone else to figure out too. (Oh, and if you find this useful, just drop me a reply or an e-mail.) Windows users will need to have ActivePerl installed.
I was also going to just paste the code here, but Slashdot doesn't seem to let people post perl code. (I'm sure they have their reasons.) So I've upload it to my web site. Here's the link: http://www.urateit.com/jlevine/spam-baiter.zip
Slashdot Mirror
When I launched my site I wanted to give away my programs for free, yet I needed to recoup costs of my web account. My solution: Voluntary payments through PayPal. The results so far: Very good. I've raised enough in 3 months to run my web server for 8-9 months.
;-)
I think there are 3 key elements to a successful micopayment system. All of them are pretty common sense items, but here they are:
1. It must be voluntary: I'm not paying any amount to a site I just found before I get to review their content. And I'm very leery of "pay-per-month" sites. I just don't visit them enough to justify the cost. However, a voluntary payment system lets me say "Hey, I really liked your article on DeCSS/Online Security/whatever, here's $5."
2. Custom payments amounts: As another poster mentioned, different people value the same content differently. I might think an article is worth $5, but you might think it's worth $10, or $2, or nothing. So let people choose how much something's worse. (From experience: Sometimes they choose an amount much more than even you thought it was worth! Not that I'm complaining.
3. Must be easy to use: If the system is too complex, noone's going to give anything. I find PayPal to be good, but there's always room for improvement. The more complex the system, the more possible donars will back out before the transaction is complete.
Oops, been a few months since I ran the numbers through my head. That should have read 1.6 million per week. We got about 6 or 7 million a month.
I think what you mean to say is that banner ads can support a site if there are enough page views.
Sorry, but this is just plain wrong. And I know this from personal experience. I used to work at an online magazine called Winmag.com (formally Windows Magazine) which folded in March. We had great content, a "sticky" site (people would come back to us often), and a lot of page views (around 1.6 million a month). However, we weren't making any money from the banner ads we had up. So, CMP (which owns Winmag.com along with Byte.com and a bunch of other publications) folded it.
Ok, maybe if we were getting 1.6 million page views per day we might have broken even, but then we would have been the exception rather than the rule. Banner ads are quite simply ineffective when it comes to generating revenue.
Now, for my own site that I launched soon after Winmag.com's demise, I decided to leave out all banner ads. (Save for one for my fellow ex-Winmaggers which isn't intended to produce revenue.)
Instead, I set up a PayPal account and let people donate what they thought my site's services were worth. In the 2 1/2 months my site's been up, I've collected enough donations to keep my site running for over 9 months.
I honestly think voluntary donations are the way to go for all but the biggest site. As long as you're providing good content/services, people will be willing to donate. (Note: I said donate, not pay. Pay-per-use sites also aren't too successful, with the exception of the porn sites.)
[i]I've seen some of the longer previews for "Shrek" and they look quite a bit more real than any previous movie effort, but there is just so much that still hasn't been captured.[/i]
I read (on AintItCool I think) that they actually had made a more realistic looking princess for Shrek, but that she didn't fit in with the more "fairy-tale" surroundings. So they had to make her look a bit more cartoon-y.
For better hair effects, I'm looking forward to this fall's Monster's Inc. The monster that John Goodman provides the voice of has some of the best hair effects I've seen in awhile. (And this also is a all-CGI "cartoon" film instead of an attempt to make a all-CGI "real-life" film.)
Well, I believe when the patch was first released, it could not be uninstalled. (So if you had to e-mail someone a legitimate VBS/EXE/etc file, you'd have to go through the trouble of renaming it or zipping it up.) Also, it seems to me a bit of an overreaction. Kind of like finding an open door in your house and building a brick wall inside the door frame to keep intruders out. It's much simpler to simply install a deadbolt lock in the door (which lets people through the door only if you let them in).
Actually, there have been many problems with that patch. Besides, it doesn't address the core issue, the scripting features (while possibly very useful) can be used to easily make viruses.
Excuse the blantent plug, but instead of telling users to hack into their Windows registry (not soemthing most users are capable of), I devised a program, Script Sentry, that seizes control of the VBS extension (as well as quite a few others, but only after you approve it of course). This way, when the script is run, Script Sentry opens up, scans the script for possibly malicious code, and then alerts the user.
For example, in a momentary lapse of judgement, I open that "Love Letter" attachment I recieved. Instead of being infected though, Script Sentry alerts me that the "Love Letter" would have deleted files, edited my registry, and accessed Outlook. I tell Script Sentry not to run the script and crisis averted.
Oh, and the program is 100% free (although I have a means for people to "donate" if they feel it's worth the $$$).
In case anyone's interested, the URL is http://www.jasons-toolbox.com/scriptsentry.asp
I had a similar setup with my site URateIt.com, except that my site was too small for the ad networks. Then I opened up another site (Jason's Toolbox) on the same server dedicated to some applications I wrote. I made them freeware, but put up a Paypal form so people could pay whatever they thought they were worth if they so chose. In the month that the site's been online, I've recieved enough money through Paypal donations to keep my site running for 5 months. (Some people gave as much as $20 for a program that I would have only charged $5 for, had I made it shareware.) I'll need to get a few more months under my belt to see if this is a fluke, but it is promising.
The question of "what is a cirumvention device" is a huge slippery slope in the DCMA.
First a program that circumvents decryption (ala a compiled DeCSS) is a circumvention device.... I can buy that, though I'd argue that that in and of itself shouldn't make compiled DeCSS illegal.
But what if you get uncompiled DeCSS code and compile it for yourself? Well then the source code must be a circumvention device. Along with whatever medium you have it on (be it CD-ROM, floppy disk, or T-Shirt).
But what if you describe a general outline of how to circumvent some encryption. Not source code, but what's commonly known as pseudo-code. This won't compile, but a skilled programmer might be able to translate it into actual source code. Well, then we must make pseudo-code illegal too!
What if you don't use code, but instead just describe in plain sentences how to decrypt something? Now I guess we must make language a cirumvention device as well!
Who needs free speech when speech itself becomes illegal?
Ah, you didn't know? You have to decide whether you agree to the terms of the license that's inside the box before you open it.
I'm in LimeWire (Gnutella) right now with 212TB. And it's actually less than I'm normally used to seeing.
Yup, and it's exactly why I added SHS file protection to a freeware program I wrote that helps protect against viruses spread by Windows Scripting Host and ShellScrap Files. (I'm finishing up the next version that adds REG, HTA, Word Doc, Excel, and SHB support as well.) In case anyone's interested, you can download it from http://www.winmag.com/fixes/watchdog/.
I don't think those examples either didn't harm the users sufficiently enough to warrent a breakup or weren't MS's fault entirely.
The ILOVEYOU virus and it's clones were made possible by Microsoft adding the scripting capabilities of Windows Scripting Host to their OS. This is similar to what many flavors of UNIX have. Unfortunately, because of the sheer number of people that use Windows (and Outlook which was needed to spread the virus), the virus caused more damage than a similar Unix or Linux-based virus would. (This is similar to the opt-stated argument that Windows is more vunerable to viruses because there are more viruses written for it. If you were a virus author and you wanted your virus to have the biggest impact, of course you're going to target the biggest OS!) As a side note, there are tools available that will protect users against these viruses. (Including one I wrote called WatchDog which you can download from http://www.winmag.com/fixes/watchdog/.)
The incompatible file formats were indeed a nuisance, but how will breaking up Microsoft fix that? By making an apps company whose biggest source of revenue is from Office upgrades?
Maybe I'm in the minority here, but my home and office systems are shut down every night, not because I'm afraid they'll crash, but because I want to save some $$$ on my electric bill. I have no desire to leave my home computer on when I'm sleeping at night. Realize that servers are another issue, I'm talking about your average home and business user. Most of the crashes I've come across are due to poorly written apps (*cough**cough*Lotus Notes*cough**cough*) or bad hardware drivers. I can't remember the last time I had a purely Windows-related crash. So we should break up Microsoft because some 3rd party company was lazy in their error trapping?
As for people hating Windows, I know some people do, but not everyone. Certainly not me. So the government should step in and break up a company because some customers don't like the product (yet still insist on using it)? Are you punishing Microsoft for marketing so well that people think that they have to use Windows? Maybe while we're at it, we should require all ads to list some competitors?
I agree that some of Microsoft's practices were questionable, but I don't think the consumer harm warrents a breakup.
Or maybe a "Save this ad for later" feature. Then when you log in to the ad system you'd have to option of viewing (and deleteing) your saved ads as well as changing your user preferences.
Just keep generating a supply of stem cells, and build over any failed component.
And what do you do once something is wrong with the person's brain. You can't just rip out a chunk of it and drop in some stem cells. This isn't a "live forever" thing. It's a "possible way to reap the rich medical harvest that stem cells can provide without the annoying ethical questions surrounding fetuses." (Meaning, a lukemia treatment that would have previously needed a fetus' stem cells might now be able to be done with a person's own cells.)
As far as displaying poorly with poorly-written code, well, that's your fault. As for the quirks, I guess that depends on how you use it. For me, netscape has had the fewer quirks. IE will tend to do some pretty random stuff in fixed-width tables.
I've had no problems with IE and tables. NS and percentage-width tables can get funky. And as for "poorly-written" code.... If a page is perfect except for a closing TABLE tag at the end of a page, the browser should be smart enough to know to close out the table (since there's nothing else on the page). IE does this. NS doesn't. (Like I said above, NS 4. I can't speak for NS 6.)
And is it my fault if I use perfectly good, W3C standard CSS2 code which NS4 doesn't display properly? And a response of "then don't use CSS2" doesn't hold water. It's a standard (not some MS-specific tags). They had years to support it. They didn't.
Sorry, but things like CSS2 are W3C standards that NS 4 had years to support but didn't. (NS6 claims to support them, but I haven't had a chance to test it yet.) Meanwhile IE4+ supported them just fine. (Ok, maybe not 100%, more like 90%. But it was better than NS4's 0%.)
As far as designing web pages go, it's a real pain to try to make a page compatible for NS. It's a stickler for 100% perfect code (how many of us has forgotten a closing TR tag that ruins a page in NS). And in many cases, it's quirks can drive you nuts. (Tried tracking down a style-sheet problem once. Two hours later I discovered that NS doesn't like for the first character of a style-sheet to be a number. IE displayed it just fine.)
In spite of all that, my philosophy is: I might develop towards IE users, but I try to make my pages degrade nicely for NS users. NS users might not get the page 100% the way I want it shown (which is the way IE users see it), but they will get a decent readable page.
As far as the guy who's rejecting 25% of his potential site visitors because they aren't using IE, I'd be willing to bet that this type of behavior won't spread to e-commerce sites. No "e-store" in their right mind would turn away 25% of their customers just because their browser wasn't up to par. They might incorporate some whiz-bang new features that only IE users can see. (Same as some of them have features that only people with certain plug-ins can see.) But they'll make sure that people using other browsers can still browse and buy from their store. Either that or they'll lose the business of NS users.
Let's take the case of a site I run (http://www.urateit.com). The site's purpose is allowing readers to review infomercial products. It's not a very high-traffic site, but it costs me around $400 a year to maintain and doesn't supply any income. Advertising wouldn't help at all. (I fall below most ad network's "minimum page view" requirements.) I was toying with adding a "toss a nickel in the jar" PayPal link, but I'm guessing I'd get next to nothing that way either.
As it happens, I run this site with a friend of mine. We split the costs. He's always telling me that I should sell some of the products that we review. But, in my mind, once I do that, the reviews become tainted. I figure journalistic integrity demands that reviewer not have a commercial stake in the reviewed product.
I agree with you wholeheartedly about those who say that sites should find a way to make money without advertising or get off the 'Net. They obviously don't have a site of their own, or only have a free Geocities page. Besides banner ads, the only ways of a site staying afloat, are selling products, or "teaming up" with a big conglomerate that doesn't mind the slow $$$ leak the site represents. Selling products isn't guaranteed (and in some cases can be bad for a site's reputation) and the thought of all web sites being owned by huge companies just makes me shudder. (Imagine if Slashdot were to become a gobbled up by AOL-TIME-WARNER in order to stay afloat.)
I'm of a mind that it should be a NO PARTY system.
...the Founding Fathers were hardly saints...
Actually, George Washington was deeply opposed to political parties. I think a party affiliation shouldn't be a criteria for voting for a person and it definitely should not be a criteria for how the candidate will vote once their in office. I don't want my representative voting for or against a bill simply because the other members of his party are also. Completely smacks of a peer pressure mentality. Do these people represent the American people or do they represent their party? (Hint: The correct answer shouldn't be "their party" but it usually is.)
Good to hear someone who actually thinks the Founding Fathers were just people. They might have put together a system that's worked pretty well, but they weren't perfect. A lot of people today seem to have raised the Founding Fathers to near-godhood. I wouldn't be too surprised to hear of someone opening a "Church of the Founding Fathers."
How's this? ;-)
Well for a few reasons. First of all experiments in space yield insights into science that can be applied on Earth to improve the quality of life. These so-called "NASA Spinoffs" include Scratch Resistant Lenses, Athletic Shoes, Laser Agioplasty, and better brakes. For a more detailed list you can look at NASA Spinoffs or The NASA Spinoff Database.
Also, if we can manage to make getting to the asteriod belt affordable, there's a HUGE untapped natural resource that could be very useful.
All in all, I'd say it's worth a lot more than the "one penny out of every dollar in the U.S. federal budget" that we're spending now.
AIDS doesn't just spread from sexual practices, but from intravenous drug use and blood transfusions. However once the blood transfusions path was brought to light, new screening methods kept the HIV infected blood out of the transfusion pool. Reducing the infection rate from intravenous drug use is a bit more tricky. You can educate about using clean needles, but any effort to supply clean needles runs into a big controversy. (The "do we support their habit by supplying them with the needles or encourage them to stop and stand by while they get infected" quandry.)
In it, Moses is dictating the Torah to Aaron. He starts out "Fifteen Billion years ago there was a big bang and...". Aaron interrupts him and tells him that they don't have enough papyrus to write down 15 billion years of history. They keep whittling it down until they get to just 7 days.
I can see it now.... It's the 23rd century and all the surfers have left earth to ride the waves on the fifth moon of HD179949. ;-)
"The week you spend playing Bard's Tale is one week of delayed revenues for Ultima 2001 Pro Special Gold Edition."
So by the same logic, if I happen to have a legal copy of "Bard's Tale" on my system, then playing that for a week is robbing the poor software companies of money because I'm not running out to the store to buy the new "Ultima 2001 Pro Special Gold Edition?" Sorry, but I just don't buy it. If we accept that then we might as well let software companies print "you can play this for X years and then you must delete it" clauses onto their boxes.
I think software companies are ignoring a potential here. Say they re-release a classic 1980's game of theirs as "classic-ware" (to coin a new term). You would get the software for free and could distribute it to all your friends. The catch would be that it contain a built-in ad for either a similar new game of theirs or an updated version of the classic one you'd be about to play. (Kind of a "if-you-like-this-try-this-one" message.)
They could write off any potential "lost sales" as advertising expenses. I know I wouldn't really mind a two second ad (if tastefully done) in return for a legal, free re-release of my favorite classic game.
That got me to thinking. Back when I reviewed shareware for Windows Magazine, I came upon an interesting program whose only purpose was to make a HTML page with randomly generated false e-mail addresses.
;-) ) I'll leave that to someone else to figure out too. (Oh, and if you find this useful, just drop me a reply or an e-mail.) Windows users will need to have ActivePerl installed.
;-)
One way spammers compile their e-mail address lists is to troll Web pages and pick up as many e-mail addresses as they can. By making one of these "Spam Bait" pages, and linking to it from a main page, you'd poison the spammer's database with nonworking random e-mail addresses. Of course this was a Windows-only binary and the web page has, over the course of time, vanished. So I've recreated the functionality in a Perl Script.
Some notes before I give you the code: I made and tested this script on a Windows 2000 machine. Some tweaking will, no doubt, need to be done for this to run on Linux or other platforms. I'm sure there are plenty of people here who can do that. (Unfortunately, I don't have access to a Linux machine right now.) Also, it occurred to me that you could make this into a CGI Perl script that, on every load, would give a new set of random addresses. (So spammers might think they hit a treasure-trove of e-mails.
I was also going to just paste the code here, but Slashdot doesn't seem to let people post perl code. (I'm sure they have their reasons.) So I've upload it to my web site. Here's the link: http://www.urateit.com/jlevine/spam-baiter.zip
Hope you enjoy baiting the spammers.