Given the presence of Hollywood, Silicon Valley, defense contractors and farming economies like the Imperial Valley, implying that public employees and their union are omnipotent is laughable.
Your economy isn't faltering. Some areas were gutted by industry itself (manufacturing), some have tech-related disruptive challenges (movies/music), and farm revenue and silicon valley revenue are booming. Your tax rate above 200k income remains at record lows, percentagewise. Your tax rate overall is slim compared to years ago. Even CalPERS has trimmed down administrative costs steadily in the last 5 years (http://www.calpers.ca.gov/eip-docs/about/facts/general.pdf)
Individual corruption is a red herring, too. Shine some light into those dark areas, root it out (corporate / private or public), and we'll... oh, wait, that's already being done.
The problem in Cali is the same as everywhere else: mere working stiffs not seeing any of 40 years of prosperity vs. corporate and 1%er's taxes plunging. Add in your state's epic damage from Prop 13 and similar right-wing nuttery, and you've created this economic pinch. Stop blaming the last bastion of union/pensioned people: when most of them got their jobs, they took lower pay in trade for stability and a pension. The problem isn't them, it's that you've screwed so many other middle-class people in the state and propped up banksters and billionaires with the proceeds until public employees' situation looks enviable enough to the rest of the citizenry to assault.
Srsly, I'm a security geek and I'm laughing at the copypasta quantity you just put in there. For a guy who admits he doesn't know security. For a guy who admits he'll never likely know it.
Meh, in less than 17 years, the knowledge that X does Y will be public.
Personally, I didn't map the fuckers out so I can't really be offended that someone that HAS mapped genetic data and suffered through the research to determine what they do gets payment for it for a patent term.
For what it is worth, I suspect there will be a lot more than 40,000 (isn't that number from TFA) unique rules hiding in DNA. In other words, 20 years from now, I still expect us to be making inroads and discoveries that deserve patent. Another few decades after that, if we survive that long, we'll have similar progress with nonhuman DNA, and another wave of patents with value either because our direct or indirect benefit from them (mods to human DNA or mods to critters, in other words).
SpaceX is doing 'IT' cheaper? For 'IT's that are smaller, simpler, shorter-ranged, shorter-lived, based on existing tech, etc, sure they are. SpaceX is the bees knees. But that's like saying my RC car outcorners an F1 and costs like a million times less (based on a proposal to limit team budgets to $40M/year).
I don't say this to diss SpaceX: good research and bypassing institutionalization while fostering engineering creativity is a good thing. They're doing good work. Engineers just know there's no free lunch: Good engineering costs a lot and good fundamental research in unfamiliar physical domains (pressure, temp, chemical composition, forces) costs much more. What's more, established entities pick up constraints: safety rules, regulations, etc. As SpaceX's ambitions and constraints grow, so will their costs.
The cliche about rocket science wasn't coined for nothin'.
(in a moment, I'll be regretting (again) commenting to slashdot on anything involving NASA or rocket science... Slashdot never ceases to amaze me with commenters' delusions that they're qualified to bitch about other technical realms).
CS101: Using live data as a primary key is bad database design in part because of the risk of two records wanting the same key.
Yet DNS does this. Artificial scarcity (and any alternative of gloom and doom) is a byproduct of an intrinsically flawed design. Call me crazy, but names, companies, etc all manage to cope despite redundancies by us resorting to more keys than just the name.
Inertia means DNS names being unique is a 'problem' unlikely to be 'fixed'. But don't trumpet $1.4B (ballpark -- 140M domains, $10 apiece) being charged users as a necessary evil because of domain squatters.
Until PDF's got to be easier, grad school with internationals gave me a lot of exposure to pirated books out of China, India, Brazil, etc. Everything matches except for the paper quality (had a faint-formaldehyde smell).
Books have cloned quite nicely for centuries. And there's preexisting laws to deal with them. Copyright, however, never superceded the doctrine of first sale. And yet now we're getting sold digital media that copies easier but is denied via other channels.
Three reasonable non-pirate use cases come to mind: - buying and selling used content. - transfer of an estate's content (who gets my vinyl when I die, vs. who gets my itunes catalog when I die) - transfer of content purchased for a minor child, when that child is old enough to open an account (13 or 18 or whatever). News recently had this with a content buyer vs. Steam. This varies from the 2nd because derivative data (characters, experience, etc) makes 'just buy a new one' deeply unacceptable without transfer of that additional data.
Yeah, one of my least favorite enterprise circlejerks was watching IT and InfoSec debate endlessly 'which email do I trust' and 'not doing an external survey because it involves clicking a link from an email' etc.
I mentally and emotionally left ubuntu behind when this 'train wreck' started, and have been churning along with Mint and Debian (for servers) getting most of my love.
This clarifies what the intent is for Ubuntu. More importantly to me, it resonates in a way that win8 and 'just like tablets and the new windows' never did -- this hints at a unix / X11 / 'network is the computer' mindset, where the UI and the data/computation are decoupled in ways that add flexibility, rather than straitjacketing power users.
I'm still hesitant, but I'll give Ubuntu a second chance based on this. Personal cpu/data devices and UI portability / flexibility wouldn't suck -- As long as Canonical sticks with a goal/plan for the UI being a realignment-to *AND* extension-of tablet UI design concepts, and not just carving off the complexity, or rearranging shit to be win00b-friendly.
Yup. I really depressed some friends who were priming themselves to quit corporate and start up when I asked what their 'moat' was? A: The WHAT? Me: The moat... the barrier to competition? What is your 'secret sauce' that keeps some megacorp from letting you do all the hard work defining your niche, then asking a team to reverse engineer your product? What's the secret they'll never master, the patent, the copyright? It's like a moat around a castle. A: Um... uh...
They're still corporate drones, but they did create the project as FOSS. It's doing ok, they're happy and busy and one of them parlayed that project into a good raise at another company closer to what he loves.
OTOH, I know another guy who embraced a project that went big. Megacorps are good at balancing 'how much to reengineer' against 'can we just hire/buy the underlying code and talent'?
LOL, GP invokes strawman (all regulations are a liberal conspiracy) on your side of the argument. P responds with ORLY?! So you claim his answer is another strawman. That's some serious drain-bammage, bro. Do like P suggests and change stations, quick!
Seriously; if libertarianism is about being unencumbered to a point where every environmental, health or safety misdeed is allowed under the dual banners of 'capitalistic self-interest prevents abuse' and 'caveat emptor', it's even less viable than communism. But you may already know that. I've noticed that extremism tends to be pushed either by nutjobs, fools, or people knowingly working the Overton Window. Which are you?
Apologies in advance for the 'when did you stop beating your wife' tendencies to that question.
customizability is not the crux definition of a PC. I can't tell you how many ways I've had laptops unupgradeable over the years (NEC UltraLite, anyone) but they've all been PC's.
I don't really have a dog in this hunt, btw. Haven't decided whether I consider a pad a pc or not. I say 'not' when it involves software compatibility, ability to edit word docs, etc. But when I start getting into how I'm using it, it starts to feel like a business device used personally for computing and that acronyms down to business PC. When I'm at home and surfing, that's home PC taskage. When my kids take a turn, it's a game PC, etc.
It's a candy mint / it's a breath mint.... fuck it and accept that netbooks, notebooks, smart phones, desktops and smart appliances are all PC's. The acronym PC is dead, long live the acronym.
they didn't. 2 of the 3 pie's fat slices involve the OS.
From http://www.microsoft.com/investor/CompanyInfo/SegmentInfo/ServerAndTools/Overview.aspx "Server and Tools product and service offerings include Windows Server, Microsoft SQL Server, Windows Azure, Visual Studio, System Center products, Windows Embedded device platforms, and Enterprise Services. Enterprise Services comprise Premier product support services and Microsoft Consulting Services."
To be fair, you're both going semantic and offtopic: rerun this argument like the monty python spanish inquisition script, and say that OS and business and servers are the cash cow yadda yadda...
Already been done -- Anyone remember that 'olestra' stuff? Inverted-molecule fat for fat-free pringles? Stuff died a dismal market death when word came out that it tended to cause 'rectal leakage'. Or, as Dave Barry said: "Warning! BUTT DRAINO!"
And by saying so, you get pegged with one word, which is unprintable and would just get me troll-rated..
Seriously, this isn't even on the top ten list of characterizations of the Obama administration. Then again, the top adjective list from Fox reads like political word salad anyway: Fascist, Communist, Socialist, Liberal, Nazi, Bankster, Corporation-owned, Wall-street, AntiGun, Islamic, anti-religious, imperialist, weak, etc.
Given the sheer number of absurd words chosen and mutual contradictions and the centrist-right nature of the Obama administration (ask any liberal or progressive, we can quantify the ways we object to his stances as too-conservative), let's face it: your party needs to rediscover how to use a dictionary.
Oh, and **ALL** are better than war. Nothing says intrusive like killing. Every political act, even the worst, is an attempt to resolve power struggles without warfare.
Sit-ins are intrusive. Picket lines are intrusive. Lockouts are intrusive. Boycotts, tea parties, monkeywrenching: intrusive, intrusive, intrusive. One could argue that defending oneself against negative political cartoons gets in the way of controlling one's message: intrusive.
Shouting from atop a soapbox: intrusive.
Unfettered political speech / expression routinely gets messy. Several of these are reprehensible in comparison to pamphleteering and other more civilized methods of getting one's message out, but each has shown they have their places. Asymmetry (an imbalance of power) forces asymmetric counterattacks.
That's why these are common. Now we just have to debate whether it's entirely depressing or a necessary evil...
Third 'if' is obscure (works for a reason that isn't evident/obvious). It also fails for m,n where m is a multiple of n (3 and 6), might fail for other patterns but I'm not seeing a solid proof either direction. If spec changes, your cleverness might introduce a bug.
Note, I really do think what you did is clever. If bytes still cost 1000x man-hours, you'd win. But for real-world use, do the else. It reads sanely. Yours made me start contemplating math proofs. Clever is a great measure of deep hackerly understanding. We just spend years unlearning 'clever as fuck' because it bites us on the ass eventually.
Going full anthropomorphic, the computer doesn't CARE how long (2, 4, 8 or 60 mins) we take to warm up, as long as it's balanced by how hard we rock it's world when we get busy. Four lines? Hope they're the model of code elegance and wisdom. Take an hour just to get started? Better be awesome, with deep penetrating insights ("yeah, I've never though of it that way before"). Done in sixty seconds in an elevator? Sweet.
* am torn between whether chasing 'damn kids off my lawn' IS or ISN'T worth counting. Depends on the mood, I guess.
A: $140?! At near-zero bandwidth, unless storage is large (i.e., you're storing 10+ gigs of data on the site for public access), find a cheaper provider. Asmallorange's lowest plan is a few bucks per month. Amazon's cloud stuff may be almost free, too, based on a hit/day metric. B: I'd presume FIL is writing off the expense, so real after-tax cost is down roughly a third from there. $30 bucks becomes $20. C: With domain registration, you'll still end up having some cost. Back up to $30. D: If all you get is a hit a day, focus on correct info on various high-scoring results: (yourstate) (your name) (your specialty). Don't obsess, but think about it occasionally. E: 9/10ths of local advertising mechanisms that are begging (BEGGING!) for your business will create little web-presence improvements free with any ad purchased. Instead of considering $140 a year expensive (!), do little PR things: clean up or add data for local-hospital / local/state registries / WebMD / yelp / yellow page / local newspaper / chamber of commerce presence. Analyze where clients come from, and do 80/20 effort on the sure stuff and the stuff I just mentioned - The ROI for small psych practices might be negligible, but he WILL pick up clients based on people stumbling across his name in these places, or by recommendations. F: look at his home broadband contract: running a server from there could get DOS'd by the ISP noticing him, could get a price increase for violation of a 'no hosting' clause, and could just get DOS'd because the ISP doesn't notice him: my self-administered exim server got to be too much of a PITA eventually, with my ISP doing random things to silence rogue spam daemons.
Having said that, I'm also running tiny sites or daemons from a wrt54g, from a few Amahi servers, a Shiva (and have friends doing everyhting from FREESCO to PWNIE to RPi). Rock on. Just recognize that $140 a year isn't a good business motive.
Think I replied to you elsewhere, said you didn't know shit. From here, I can see it ain't that you're ignorant... you've just been burned. My apologies.
I completely get where you're coming from. Any championship starts to get burdened with side values/costs, whether it's olympics or these sorts of academic leagues or even amateur sports. It's the golden rule, in reverse: Money corrupts, more money corrupts things more. Maybe I'm lucky: my kids are so far down the damn well that merely qualifying for state boggled our minds and will expand their horizons immensely. Some of these kids come from entire families that have never set foot on a college campus or seen knowledge work as a career possibility. I don't want them to strive to almost win and then get nuked by the money-centered cheaters club. That'd sting bitterly, and again my condolences -- most of us have this happen occasionally. But that's not the only possible takeaway. I just want my kids to see more career options than their parents saw.
BTW, you're still wrong about FIRST w/r/t FIRST Lego: entirely preprogrammed minibots. The bots may seem lame, but what were you expecting for 5th and 6th grade kids?
Slashdot Mirror
Given the presence of Hollywood, Silicon Valley, defense contractors and farming economies like the Imperial Valley, implying that public employees and their union are omnipotent is laughable.
Your economy isn't faltering. Some areas were gutted by industry itself (manufacturing), some have tech-related disruptive challenges (movies/music), and farm revenue and silicon valley revenue are booming. Your tax rate above 200k income remains at record lows, percentagewise. Your tax rate overall is slim compared to years ago. Even CalPERS has trimmed down administrative costs steadily in the last 5 years (http://www.calpers.ca.gov/eip-docs/about/facts/general.pdf)
Individual corruption is a red herring, too. Shine some light into those dark areas, root it out (corporate / private or public), and we'll... oh, wait, that's already being done.
The problem in Cali is the same as everywhere else: mere working stiffs not seeing any of 40 years of prosperity vs. corporate and 1%er's taxes plunging. Add in your state's epic damage from Prop 13 and similar right-wing nuttery, and you've created this economic pinch. Stop blaming the last bastion of union/pensioned people: when most of them got their jobs, they took lower pay in trade for stability and a pension. The problem isn't them, it's that you've screwed so many other middle-class people in the state and propped up banksters and billionaires with the proceeds until public employees' situation looks enviable enough to the rest of the citizenry to assault.
tl;dr: OMGMYEYES!!!
Srsly, I'm a security geek and I'm laughing at the copypasta quantity you just put in there. For a guy who admits he doesn't know security. For a guy who admits he'll never likely know it.
Meh, in less than 17 years, the knowledge that X does Y will be public.
Personally, I didn't map the fuckers out so I can't really be offended that someone that HAS mapped genetic data and suffered through the research to determine what they do gets payment for it for a patent term.
For what it is worth, I suspect there will be a lot more than 40,000 (isn't that number from TFA) unique rules hiding in DNA. In other words, 20 years from now, I still expect us to be making inroads and discoveries that deserve patent. Another few decades after that, if we survive that long, we'll have similar progress with nonhuman DNA, and another wave of patents with value either because our direct or indirect benefit from them (mods to human DNA or mods to critters, in other words).
SpaceX is doing 'IT' cheaper? For 'IT's that are smaller, simpler, shorter-ranged, shorter-lived, based on existing tech, etc, sure they are. SpaceX is the bees knees. But that's like saying my RC car outcorners an F1 and costs like a million times less (based on a proposal to limit team budgets to $40M/year).
I don't say this to diss SpaceX: good research and bypassing institutionalization while fostering engineering creativity is a good thing. They're doing good work. Engineers just know there's no free lunch: Good engineering costs a lot and good fundamental research in unfamiliar physical domains (pressure, temp, chemical composition, forces) costs much more. What's more, established entities pick up constraints: safety rules, regulations, etc. As SpaceX's ambitions and constraints grow, so will their costs.
The cliche about rocket science wasn't coined for nothin'.
(in a moment, I'll be regretting (again) commenting to slashdot on anything involving NASA or rocket science... Slashdot never ceases to amaze me with commenters' delusions that they're qualified to bitch about other technical realms).
Small subset... LOL.
CS101: Using live data as a primary key is bad database design in part because of the risk of two records wanting the same key.
Yet DNS does this. Artificial scarcity (and any alternative of gloom and doom) is a byproduct of an intrinsically flawed design. Call me crazy, but names, companies, etc all manage to cope despite redundancies by us resorting to more keys than just the name.
Inertia means DNS names being unique is a 'problem' unlikely to be 'fixed'. But don't trumpet $1.4B (ballpark -- 140M domains, $10 apiece) being charged users as a necessary evil because of domain squatters.
Until PDF's got to be easier, grad school with internationals gave me a lot of exposure to pirated books out of China, India, Brazil, etc. Everything matches except for the paper quality (had a faint-formaldehyde smell).
Books have cloned quite nicely for centuries. And there's preexisting laws to deal with them. Copyright, however, never superceded the doctrine of first sale. And yet now we're getting sold digital media that copies easier but is denied via other channels.
Three reasonable non-pirate use cases come to mind:
- buying and selling used content.
- transfer of an estate's content (who gets my vinyl when I die, vs. who gets my itunes catalog when I die)
- transfer of content purchased for a minor child, when that child is old enough to open an account (13 or 18 or whatever). News recently had this with a content buyer vs. Steam. This varies from the 2nd because derivative data (characters, experience, etc) makes 'just buy a new one' deeply unacceptable without transfer of that additional data.
Space exploration is to sea exploration like ... well, like hard vacuum is to getting stranded on a beach:
There's (forgive the pun) astronomically less chance of surviving a fuckup in space.
Going on fifteen years of wishing computer geeks would learn that ROCKET SCIENCE HAS THE 'ITS NOT ROCKET SCIENCE' REPUTATION FOR A REASON.
Yeah, one of my least favorite enterprise circlejerks was watching IT and InfoSec debate endlessly 'which email do I trust' and 'not doing an external survey because it involves clicking a link from an email' etc.
What about Hurricane and FuckinHumid? Are they the seasonal equivalent of a Hobbit's 'Second Breakfast'?
I mentally and emotionally left ubuntu behind when this 'train wreck' started, and have been churning along with Mint and Debian (for servers) getting most of my love.
This clarifies what the intent is for Ubuntu. More importantly to me, it resonates in a way that win8 and 'just like tablets and the new windows' never did -- this hints at a unix / X11 / 'network is the computer' mindset, where the UI and the data/computation are decoupled in ways that add flexibility, rather than straitjacketing power users.
I'm still hesitant, but I'll give Ubuntu a second chance based on this. Personal cpu/data devices and UI portability / flexibility wouldn't suck -- As long as Canonical sticks with a goal/plan for the UI being a realignment-to *AND* extension-of tablet UI design concepts, and not just carving off the complexity, or rearranging shit to be win00b-friendly.
Oops. GP actually used the word correctly -- google it, break out a dictionary or just rely on these quotes: http://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/keywords/apprehend.html
And ethics can't be figured out by polling for people that don't mind a concern/problem.
Yup. I really depressed some friends who were priming themselves to quit corporate and start up when I asked what their 'moat' was? A: The WHAT? Me: The moat... the barrier to competition? What is your 'secret sauce' that keeps some megacorp from letting you do all the hard work defining your niche, then asking a team to reverse engineer your product? What's the secret they'll never master, the patent, the copyright? It's like a moat around a castle. A: Um... uh...
They're still corporate drones, but they did create the project as FOSS. It's doing ok, they're happy and busy and one of them parlayed that project into a good raise at another company closer to what he loves.
OTOH, I know another guy who embraced a project that went big. Megacorps are good at balancing 'how much to reengineer' against 'can we just hire/buy the underlying code and talent'?
LOL, GP invokes strawman (all regulations are a liberal conspiracy) on your side of the argument. P responds with ORLY?! So you claim his answer is another strawman. That's some serious drain-bammage, bro. Do like P suggests and change stations, quick!
Seriously; if libertarianism is about being unencumbered to a point where every environmental, health or safety misdeed is allowed under the dual banners of 'capitalistic self-interest prevents abuse' and 'caveat emptor', it's even less viable than communism. But you may already know that. I've noticed that extremism tends to be pushed either by nutjobs, fools, or people knowingly working the Overton Window. Which are you?
Apologies in advance for the 'when did you stop beating your wife' tendencies to that question.
Anyone else read that second url and think it ended 'cybermen'?
customizability is not the crux definition of a PC. I can't tell you how many ways I've had laptops unupgradeable over the years (NEC UltraLite, anyone) but they've all been PC's.
I don't really have a dog in this hunt, btw. Haven't decided whether I consider a pad a pc or not. I say 'not' when it involves software compatibility, ability to edit word docs, etc. But when I start getting into how I'm using it, it starts to feel like a business device used personally for computing and that acronyms down to business PC. When I'm at home and surfing, that's home PC taskage. When my kids take a turn, it's a game PC, etc.
It's a candy mint / it's a breath mint.... fuck it and accept that netbooks, notebooks, smart phones, desktops and smart appliances are all PC's. The acronym PC is dead, long live the acronym.
they didn't. 2 of the 3 pie's fat slices involve the OS.
From http://www.microsoft.com/investor/CompanyInfo/SegmentInfo/ServerAndTools/Overview.aspx
"Server and Tools product and service offerings include Windows Server, Microsoft SQL Server, Windows Azure, Visual Studio, System Center products, Windows Embedded device platforms, and Enterprise Services. Enterprise Services comprise Premier product support services and Microsoft Consulting Services."
To be fair, you're both going semantic and offtopic: rerun this argument like the monty python spanish inquisition script, and say that OS and business and servers are the cash cow yadda yadda...
Bloatwarepad is subsidized, just like Zune was.
Already been done -- Anyone remember that 'olestra' stuff? Inverted-molecule fat for fat-free pringles? Stuff died a dismal market death when word came out that it tended to cause 'rectal leakage'. Or, as Dave Barry said: "Warning! BUTT DRAINO!"
And by saying so, you get pegged with one word, which is unprintable and would just get me troll-rated..
Seriously, this isn't even on the top ten list of characterizations of the Obama administration. Then again, the top adjective list from Fox reads like political word salad anyway: Fascist, Communist, Socialist, Liberal, Nazi, Bankster, Corporation-owned, Wall-street, AntiGun, Islamic, anti-religious, imperialist, weak, etc.
Given the sheer number of absurd words chosen and mutual contradictions and the centrist-right nature of the Obama administration (ask any liberal or progressive, we can quantify the ways we object to his stances as too-conservative), let's face it: your party needs to rediscover how to use a dictionary.
Oh, and **ALL** are better than war. Nothing says intrusive like killing. Every political act, even the worst, is an attempt to resolve power struggles without warfare.
Sit-ins are intrusive. Picket lines are intrusive. Lockouts are intrusive. Boycotts, tea parties, monkeywrenching: intrusive, intrusive, intrusive. One could argue that defending oneself against negative political cartoons gets in the way of controlling one's message: intrusive.
Shouting from atop a soapbox: intrusive.
Unfettered political speech / expression routinely gets messy. Several of these are reprehensible in comparison to pamphleteering and other more civilized methods of getting one's message out, but each has shown they have their places. Asymmetry (an imbalance of power) forces asymmetric counterattacks.
That's why these are common. Now we just have to debate whether it's entirely depressing or a necessary evil...
Third 'if' is obscure (works for a reason that isn't evident/obvious). It also fails for m,n where m is a multiple of n (3 and 6), might fail for other patterns but I'm not seeing a solid proof either direction. If spec changes, your cleverness might introduce a bug.
Note, I really do think what you did is clever. If bytes still cost 1000x man-hours, you'd win. But for real-world use, do the else. It reads sanely. Yours made me start contemplating math proofs. Clever is a great measure of deep hackerly understanding. We just spend years unlearning 'clever as fuck' because it bites us on the ass eventually.
This extra time* is just techno-foreplay.
Going full anthropomorphic, the computer doesn't CARE how long (2, 4, 8 or 60 mins) we take to warm up, as long as it's balanced by how hard we rock it's world when we get busy. Four lines? Hope they're the model of code elegance and wisdom. Take an hour just to get started? Better be awesome, with deep penetrating insights ("yeah, I've never though of it that way before"). Done in sixty seconds in an elevator? Sweet.
* am torn between whether chasing 'damn kids off my lawn' IS or ISN'T worth counting. Depends on the mood, I guess.
A: $140?! At near-zero bandwidth, unless storage is large (i.e., you're storing 10+ gigs of data on the site for public access), find a cheaper provider. Asmallorange's lowest plan is a few bucks per month. Amazon's cloud stuff may be almost free, too, based on a hit/day metric.
B: I'd presume FIL is writing off the expense, so real after-tax cost is down roughly a third from there. $30 bucks becomes $20.
C: With domain registration, you'll still end up having some cost. Back up to $30.
D: If all you get is a hit a day, focus on correct info on various high-scoring results: (yourstate) (your name) (your specialty). Don't obsess, but think about it occasionally.
E: 9/10ths of local advertising mechanisms that are begging (BEGGING!) for your business will create little web-presence improvements free with any ad purchased. Instead of considering $140 a year expensive (!), do little PR things: clean up or add data for local-hospital / local/state registries / WebMD / yelp / yellow page / local newspaper / chamber of commerce presence. Analyze where clients come from, and do 80/20 effort on the sure stuff and the stuff I just mentioned - The ROI for small psych practices might be negligible, but he WILL pick up clients based on people stumbling across his name in these places, or by recommendations.
F: look at his home broadband contract: running a server from there could get DOS'd by the ISP noticing him, could get a price increase for violation of a 'no hosting' clause, and could just get DOS'd because the ISP doesn't notice him: my self-administered exim server got to be too much of a PITA eventually, with my ISP doing random things to silence rogue spam daemons.
Having said that, I'm also running tiny sites or daemons from a wrt54g, from a few Amahi servers, a Shiva (and have friends doing everyhting from FREESCO to PWNIE to RPi). Rock on. Just recognize that $140 a year isn't a good business motive.
Think I replied to you elsewhere, said you didn't know shit. From here, I can see it ain't that you're ignorant... you've just been burned. My apologies.
I completely get where you're coming from. Any championship starts to get burdened with side values/costs, whether it's olympics or these sorts of academic leagues or even amateur sports. It's the golden rule, in reverse: Money corrupts, more money corrupts things more. Maybe I'm lucky: my kids are so far down the damn well that merely qualifying for state boggled our minds and will expand their horizons immensely. Some of these kids come from entire families that have never set foot on a college campus or seen knowledge work as a career possibility. I don't want them to strive to almost win and then get nuked by the money-centered cheaters club. That'd sting bitterly, and again my condolences -- most of us have this happen occasionally. But that's not the only possible takeaway. I just want my kids to see more career options than their parents saw.
BTW, you're still wrong about FIRST w/r/t FIRST Lego: entirely preprogrammed minibots. The bots may seem lame, but what were you expecting for 5th and 6th grade kids?