My spending on duck grew 30 fold over the last 2 weeks. (2 weeks ago I spent $10 on duck at a chinese restaurant, just last night I spent $300 on duck for a dinner). I think you can see where this is headed. Next week, $9,000. Week after that, $270,000. I admire your courage in publicly admitting your problem. That's the first step. I admit, I experimented with duck one time in college. If you don't get help at Charter, get help somewhere. 1-800-buyaduc. Maybe when you were a kid somebody offered you a little taste for free. That's often how it starts. Think of the children.
Yes. I can verify that there is such a law. Telephone Consumer Protection Act (TCPA) of 1991. It's handled the rare call I get. I have not followed up by suing, but I did develop a process for logging the calls and response or lack of response. http://www.ucan.org/members/ucanmembersonly/gifts4 members/takebackyourphone/letter2.html is a useful form letter. The federal do not call list is working pretty well for me. I was on the state (Indiana) list, and it turned out they weren't just blocking the calls I didn't want, but were also blocking calls I did want. Getting off the list was a hassle, took an hour and 8 phone calls. The people who will put you -on- the list don't have the ability to take you off, so I had to hunt down the bureaucrat in charge. Ordinarily a scam like that would be reported to the attorney general's office, but this -was- the attorney general's office. If I didn't want any calls at all, I know how to do that - unplug the phone. Overall, do not call list is a good thing, from the consumer end. It was implemented badly in my state. I wouldn't want to be on the other end - a small business with an occasional need to call somebody. That the government wants to sell you the list of people they don't want you to call is a good tip-off the thing's a scam.
Re:Naming Worms - Virii's pride
on
Name That Worm
·
· Score: 1
So, from that angle, is my idea about naming them after congresscritters a good or bad idea?
The average American's main complaint with Cold War Communism is the intense Government control and elimination of... culture that comes along with it. Neither of those is really relevant to Open Source, or cheap municipal Internet service. Municipal and community are opposites. Open source is an example of community. Municipalities are built on command and control hierarchies, artifacts of patterns of conquest. Wifi/wimax/etc beats hell out of dialup, but let's not confuse a technology with a politcal structure.
A couple years ago I was in Chicago at the federal courthouse to file some paperwork (ironicly in a free speech case i lost; judge posner said it's ok to put people in jail for speech of the "Vote for Smith" variety. http://majors.blogspot.com./ )
Outside the courthouse were some Fulan Gong folks, providing information about the torture and oppression they face in China. I found them persuasive and reasonable - basically nice little old ladies, with solid evidence supporting their claims. Possibly I was just taken in - I can be gullible - but they seemed to be in the right, and China in the wrong. Meanwhile the courthouse guards didn't want to let me in to file the paperwork because I didn't have a state-issued ID with me, and were unreasonable jerks. Take away the few checks and balances we have here, give the unreasonable jerks unlimited power to torture and kill those they don't understand, and you have the China-Fulang Gong situation. It's been a couple of years and I've never been able to do anything effective to help them, and that frustrates me.
1. Send letter to ESR 2. See ESR's head explode via his blog. 3. See slashdot pick up story. 4. Receive 3,000 resumes. 5. Hire best 30. 6. Profit. 7. Be able to buy own underpants.
It's called viral marketing. Hillary is Rockstar's best spokesmodel.
That's a good idea. And you proposed it to make a point, but let's take it a few steps further. Make it small, so you would be supplying a gas station at a time, not San Diego. Big just attracts terrorists and the EPA and the trial lawyers. Make it portable, on a ship or seaworthy barge, out past the 12 mile territorial limit. Find a flag of convenience - Tonga is hungry lately. Make it disposable - something with a quick payoff, like a year, not 30 years. Make a working model, then subcontract mass-production. Offer to joint venture with Dean Kamen - he's good at reducing size and cost and thinking freshly. Get sponsorship for your "research reactor" "pilot program" from a college - it opens up some paperwork exceptions. Use other people's money - this is pretty high risk. Start an open source project to support the technology, apply for lots of grants, be careful with who you deal with.
. . . I have an opportunity for you to invest in some land in south-central Florida. ..
I went to south-central florida in 1972. Cape Canaveral, and not much else, swamps, orange groves, tomato farms. Went back in 2003 - Disneyworld. I didn't have disposable investment income in 72 or 2003, but I'm guessing the rate of return has been pretty good for those who guessed right. There was a guy named AI DuPont who started buying up florida land around 1920; I'm guessing he did ok.
Sturgeon's law of IPO's applies - 90% of the mars-for-profit companies around now will likely go under, but the ones that make it will make it big. Halliburton could go to Mars to build service facilities for asteroid miners. They aren't shy about looting public treasuries to pay for it until private sector revenues kick in. In California circa 1850, some people got rich finding gold, or trading gold stocks, but the guys who sold them shovels and eggs made the real money. What we've seen about this company (4frontiers?) is the marketing brochure, not the prospectus. There's some discussion of the timing and practicality of their proposals. I'm guessing the "20 years from now" figure came from marketing, not engineering. From a marketing point of view, 20 years is the right time frame. It means I can start saving up for a retirement condo on Mars 30 years from now - when I'll need the low gravity, and enjoy the frontier culture. Twenty years is handwaving, which is OK. Another way of expressing it is, this project will be technically and economicly doable shortly after the singularity (or some critical mass of pre-singularity effects.) Some people see 20 years as a decent time frame for that, others put it at 50 or 100 years off. You don't try to go colonize Mars with today's technology, for the same reasons you don't point your ship to where Mars is now, but where it will be when you get there. There is some technology to work the kinks out of before major Mars development. That technology will be very important, and potentially profitable, on a place called earth. There's no reason it can't be worked up for a profit. Is this the company that will do that? Probably not, but by studying the wreck if it crashes and burns we can learn a few things. Or it may "mature" and become just another technology company with dim memories of how it once had big plans. I expect to see as much technology driven change in the next 20 years as in the previous 100. I could be wrong, or dead. But if you look at what Earl Halliburton did with technology between 1905 and 2005, a breakeven mars project in 20 years doesn't look inconceivable to me.
My post may be redundant too, since I haven't read every other post yet.
But the article is wrong, because it confuses growth with rate of growth.
Year zero: 100 widgets per year. Year one: 204 wpy - growth rate of 104% Year two: 304 wpy - growth rate of 49%. And that's in the first 8 months of year two! In year two, the widgets grew by as much as the first 50 years of widgethood, before yeear zero. So what the article is saying is the net is growing by leaps and bounds like never before, if terrabites between borders is a good way to measure it. Another way to think about it is that fat pipes make it easy to move a lot of data, so there's more junk and low quality data that previously wouldn't have been bothered with - the amount of high quality data being moved is probably up too, but not easy to measure. Summary: slashdot blurb is wrong due to basic math error.
Really? Government-financed research is at least in the public domain, and any entrepreneur who can see an opportunity is welcome to take the results of that research & run as far & as fast as they can go. Good point.
By contrast, and especially with the current state of our "intellectual property" laws, anything developed by a private interest will be doled out at whatever rate will maximize profit - and any attempts at competition will be ruthlessly stamped out. Bad point. The best way to maximize profit is usually to sell non-exclusive licenses to whoever is willing to pay, which in turn is people who will use the tech most widely. Patents at most bottle up an idea for 17 years (forever in computer time, but short as to overall history.) But usually, if a patented idea isn't made available via cheap licensing, somebody else finds an alternatie method to do the same sort of thing. When it comes to ruthlessly stamping things out, government is the expert, with a little competition from wannabe governments known as organized crime.
Do you really think leaving basic research up to private concerns yields the most benefit for society? Absolutely. I'd pick Dick Rutan or Edison over Idi Amin or Mao or Schumer any day.
Based on reading the article, it isn't clear the women were given any incentives to do well on the test. No cookie, nothing. What I deduced was that women are smarter, and thus more likely to game the results, appearing a little less smart than they are. In a competitive social environment, there is a tactical advantage to being a little smarter than people think you are. Apparently women are a bit more in touch with this strategy. Run the study again, but tell them there's a $100 payoff for scores over 125, and watch the scores jump. I might be wrong, but it's testable.
He wasn't busted for spamming, BTW, he was busted because he's dealing narcotics illegally and he recently flew to the DR on a forged passport.
Exactly. Mod parent up.
I had signed up for Indiana's do not call list and I thought it was working great - the telemarketers stoped calling. Turns out, so did everyone else -
the indiana rules stop people from calling me, even if we have an existing business relationship.
So I called to get my name taken off the list, but they refuse to do that.
I'm supposed to call the attorney general's office, but it's only open during the day, and i'm a noctural insectivorous mammal, so i keep forgetting to call during the day.
Spam is the same sort of deal - a law that outlaws any email doesn't help me; a law that fails to outlaw spam doesn't help much either. Currently gmail catches most if it.
2) Do you think that the government should not fund any research, only corporations? Do you think the government should not fund research for a cure for cancer? Or any other disease?
That is correct; I think government, particularly the federal government, should get out of the scientific socialism business. With maybe some limited exceptions about research that brings down the cost of whatever are indispensible government services (and nearly everything is dispensible.) It makes no more sense to think the government should write the checks than the mafia or the church. Big government is like a tumour or tapeworm holding back the market economy from being what it could be. From menengle to lysenko to the FDA, government research is a chain of horror stories and lots of really bad science. Since my continued life depends on rapid advance of tech, this concerns me. That said, currently government funds about 1/2 of science research, and much of the current rapid advance in tech does come from this. I'm not saying a government dollar spent on science is the worst possible use of a government dollar. I am saying government should get out of the way, while market driven and open source methods take over the function of driving science and technology. I did agree with your points 1 and 3.
Is it your position that every police officer must always ticket every person they see exceeding the speed limit or safely rolling through a stop sign instead of coming to a complete and utter stop? Do you have a shred of authority backing up your position? I would cite to castle rock, _ U.S_ (2005) for the proposition that police have wide discretion not to arrest people. Laws would be written very differently if legislatures believed that police were robocops with no ability to engage common sense.
Increase revenues while reducing expenses without losing quality. Ok, that's a tautology, I'll be more specific. Plan to fire somebody. Are your staff stakeholders/best friends/family, or just employees? If employees, use the site to find them a better job, while outsourcing their work to india/russia/college interns. Alternative model, use your employees as temps; hire them out for tech writing contracts that cover their pay. Revenue models: you are selling google ads and tshirts and classifieds and have a donation button. That model works well for sites with a high hip factor, boingboing.net or penny arcade. It might still work for you with some retooling. But let's look past that.
Maybe your site could broker consulting gigs for a percentage.
The most proven online revenue model is porn. You wouldn't want that on your front page, but maybe a link to a page of affiliate sites. My next comment might be controversial: Amway. Some kind of network marketing to turn eyeballs into dollars. becoming a thinkgeek affilate is the same sort of thing. i don't know if o'reilly has affilates in the way that amazon does. But amway pioneered the viral marketing model and might be worth looking closely at. Not as a pyramid scheme, but as a coop where each new member sponsors one and only one new member, until the group has buying power to get wholesale discounts. Which means about 200 active people, 0.1% of your monthly hits. Let a network like that build for a year, then start taking a 1% commission on sales. pretty soon you'd be competitive with walmart. Given that amway does a few billions in sales per year, and you'd be offering their stuff at a lower price than anyone else, it might have some potential as a revenue stream. I've used Amway as an example of a network marketing company with a full product line, but feel free to substitute some other if you find one that's better. The general idea is to find some way to build win-win relationships that turn your readers into partners, without a lot of complicated new overhead on your end. Ok, let the flaming begin.
You are mistaken. police officers have wide discretion to not make arrests, especially where as here it seems likely no crime has occurred, or at least the crime they were charged with did not occur.
Slashdot Mirror
My spending on duck grew 30 fold over the last 2 weeks. (2 weeks ago I spent $10 on duck at a chinese restaurant, just last night I spent $300 on duck for a dinner).
I think you can see where this is headed. Next week, $9,000. Week after that, $270,000.
I admire your courage in publicly admitting your problem. That's the first step.
I admit, I experimented with duck one time in college.
If you don't get help at Charter, get help somewhere. 1-800-buyaduc.
Maybe when you were a kid somebody offered you a little taste for free. That's often how it starts.
Think of the children.
good point about stats btw.
Perhaps these wargames will settle the age-old question:
Ninjas or pirates?
Bill: Dude, that's FAT!
Ted: Suite!
I don't have the exact quote handy, but Robert Heinlein said the first tool was not a weapon, it was a crutch.
http://heinleinsociety.org/
Remember, statistically, half of the people you meet are below average.
Wrong. I'm not dealing with a random sample.
Just ask yourself the following: "Who has more money to pay lobbyists -- Diebold or the Open Source Movement?"
Who has more lobbyists? Who has lobbyists who will work for free?
Now the tricky one is who has better lobbyists.
Yes.4 members/takebackyourphone/letter2.html
I can verify that there is such a law.
Telephone Consumer Protection Act (TCPA) of 1991.
It's handled the rare call I get. I have not followed up by suing,
but I did develop a process for logging the calls and response or lack of response.
http://www.ucan.org/members/ucanmembersonly/gifts
is a useful form letter.
The federal do not call list is working pretty well for me. I was on the state (Indiana) list, and it turned out they weren't just blocking the calls I didn't want, but were also blocking calls I did want.
Getting off the list was a hassle, took an hour and 8 phone calls. The people who will put you -on- the list don't have the ability to take you off, so I had to hunt down the bureaucrat in charge.
Ordinarily a scam like that would be reported to the attorney general's office, but this -was- the attorney general's office. If I didn't want any calls at all, I know how to do that - unplug the phone.
Overall, do not call list is a good thing, from the consumer end. It was implemented badly in my state.
I wouldn't want to be on the other end - a small business with an occasional need to call somebody.
That the government wants to sell you the list of people they don't want you to call is a good tip-off the thing's a scam.
So, from that angle, is my idea about naming them after congresscritters a good or bad idea?
The average American's main complaint with Cold War Communism is the intense Government control and elimination of ... culture that comes along with it. Neither of those is really relevant to Open Source, or cheap municipal Internet service.
Municipal and community are opposites. Open source is an example of community. Municipalities are built on command and control hierarchies, artifacts of patterns of conquest. Wifi/wimax/etc beats hell out of dialup, but let's not confuse a technology with a politcal structure.
A couple years ago I was in Chicago at the federal courthouse to file some paperwork (ironicly in a free speech case i lost; judge posner said it's ok to put people in jail for speech of the "Vote for Smith" variety. http://majors.blogspot.com./ )
Outside the courthouse were some Fulan Gong folks, providing information about the torture and oppression they face in China. I found them persuasive and reasonable - basically nice little old ladies, with solid evidence supporting their claims. Possibly I was just taken in - I can be gullible - but they seemed to be in the right, and China in the wrong. Meanwhile the courthouse guards didn't want to let me in to file the paperwork because I didn't have a state-issued ID with me, and were unreasonable jerks. Take away the few checks and balances we have here, give the unreasonable jerks unlimited power to torture and kill those they don't understand, and you have the China-Fulang Gong situation.
It's been a couple of years and I've never been able to do anything effective to help them, and that frustrates me.
How much money has a business made from the US landing on the Moon?
About 16 billion? The company is known as Halliburton, aka Brown and Root.
See also Mohole, Vietnam, TVA nukes, Iraq...
1. Send letter to ESR
2. See ESR's head explode via his blog.
3. See slashdot pick up story.
4. Receive 3,000 resumes.
5. Hire best 30.
6. Profit.
7. Be able to buy own underpants.
It's called viral marketing.
Hillary is Rockstar's best spokesmodel.
That's a good idea.
And you proposed it to make a point, but let's take it a few steps further.
Make it small, so you would be supplying a gas station at a time, not San Diego.
Big just attracts terrorists and the EPA and the trial lawyers.
Make it portable, on a ship or seaworthy barge, out past the 12 mile territorial limit.
Find a flag of convenience - Tonga is hungry lately.
Make it disposable - something with a quick payoff, like a year, not 30 years.
Make a working model, then subcontract mass-production.
Offer to joint venture with Dean Kamen - he's good at reducing size and cost and thinking freshly.
Get sponsorship for your "research reactor" "pilot program" from a college - it opens up some paperwork exceptions.
Use other people's money - this is pretty high risk.
Start an open source project to support the technology, apply for lots of grants, be careful with who you deal with.
I went to south-central florida in 1972. Cape Canaveral, and not much else, swamps, orange groves, tomato farms. Went back in 2003 - Disneyworld.
I didn't have disposable investment income in 72 or 2003, but I'm guessing the rate of return has been pretty good for those who guessed right. There was a guy named AI DuPont who started buying up florida land around 1920; I'm guessing he did ok.
Sturgeon's law of IPO's applies - 90% of the mars-for-profit companies around now will likely go under, but the ones that make it will make it big. Halliburton could go to Mars to build service facilities for asteroid miners. They aren't shy about looting public treasuries to pay for it until private sector revenues kick in.
In California circa 1850, some people got rich finding gold, or trading gold stocks, but the guys who sold them shovels and eggs made the real money.
What we've seen about this company (4frontiers?) is the marketing brochure, not the prospectus.
There's some discussion of the timing and practicality of their proposals. I'm guessing the "20 years from now" figure came from marketing, not engineering. From a marketing point of view, 20 years is the right time frame. It means I can start saving up for a retirement condo on Mars 30 years from now - when I'll need the low gravity, and enjoy the frontier culture.
Twenty years is handwaving, which is OK.
Another way of expressing it is, this project will be technically and economicly doable shortly after the singularity (or some critical mass of pre-singularity effects.) Some people see 20 years as a decent time frame for that, others put it at 50 or 100 years off.
You don't try to go colonize Mars with today's technology, for the same reasons you don't point your ship to where Mars is now, but where it will be when you get there.
There is some technology to work the kinks out of before major Mars development. That technology will be very important, and potentially profitable, on a place called earth. There's no reason it can't be worked up for a profit.
Is this the company that will do that? Probably not, but by studying the wreck if it crashes and burns we can learn a few things. Or it may "mature" and become just another technology company with dim memories of how it once had big plans.
I expect to see as much technology driven change in the next 20 years as in the previous 100. I could be wrong, or dead. But if you look at what Earl Halliburton did with technology between 1905 and 2005, a breakeven mars project in 20 years doesn't look inconceivable to me.
My post may be redundant too, since I haven't read every other post yet.
But the article is wrong, because it confuses growth with rate of growth.
Year zero: 100 widgets per year.
Year one: 204 wpy - growth rate of 104%
Year two: 304 wpy - growth rate of 49%.
And that's in the first 8 months of year two!
In year two, the widgets grew by as much as the first 50 years of widgethood, before yeear zero.
So what the article is saying is the net is
growing by leaps and bounds like never before,
if terrabites between borders is a good way to measure it.
Another way to think about it is that fat pipes make it easy to move a lot of data, so there's more junk and low quality data that previously wouldn't have been bothered with - the amount of high quality data being moved is probably up too, but not easy to measure.
Summary: slashdot blurb is wrong due to basic math error.
Really? Government-financed research is at least in the public domain, and any entrepreneur who can see an opportunity is welcome to take the results of that research & run as far & as fast as they can go. Good point.
By contrast, and especially with the current state of our "intellectual property" laws, anything developed by a private interest will be doled out at whatever rate will maximize profit - and any attempts at competition will be ruthlessly stamped out. Bad point. The best way to maximize profit is usually to sell non-exclusive licenses to whoever is willing to pay, which in turn is people who will use the tech most widely.
Patents at most bottle up an idea for 17 years (forever in computer time, but short as to overall history.) But usually, if a patented idea isn't made available via cheap licensing, somebody else finds an alternatie method to do the same sort of thing. When it comes to ruthlessly stamping things out, government is the expert, with a little competition from wannabe governments known as organized crime.
Do you really think leaving basic research up to private concerns yields the most benefit for society? Absolutely. I'd pick Dick Rutan or Edison over Idi Amin or Mao or Schumer any day.
Based on reading the article, it isn't clear the women were given any incentives to do well on the test. No cookie, nothing. What I deduced was that women are smarter, and thus more likely to game the results, appearing a little less smart than they are.
In a competitive social environment, there is a tactical advantage to being a little smarter than people think you are. Apparently women are a bit more in touch with this strategy. Run the study again, but tell them there's a $100 payoff for scores over 125, and watch the scores jump.
I might be wrong, but it's testable.
He wasn't busted for spamming, BTW, he was busted because he's dealing narcotics illegally and he recently flew to the DR on a forged passport. Exactly. Mod parent up.
I had signed up for Indiana's do not call list and I thought it was working great - the telemarketers stoped calling. Turns out, so did everyone else - the indiana rules stop people from calling me, even if we have an existing business relationship. So I called to get my name taken off the list, but they refuse to do that. I'm supposed to call the attorney general's office, but it's only open during the day, and i'm a noctural insectivorous mammal, so i keep forgetting to call during the day. Spam is the same sort of deal - a law that outlaws any email doesn't help me; a law that fails to outlaw spam doesn't help much either. Currently gmail catches most if it.
2) Do you think that the government should not fund any research, only corporations? Do you think the government should not fund research for a cure for cancer? Or any other disease?
That is correct; I think government, particularly the federal government, should get out of the scientific socialism business. With maybe some limited exceptions about research that brings down the cost of whatever are indispensible government services (and nearly everything is dispensible.) It makes no more sense to think the government should write the checks than the mafia or the church. Big government is like a tumour or tapeworm holding back the market economy from being what it could be. From menengle to lysenko to the FDA, government research is a chain of horror stories and lots of really bad science.
Since my continued life depends on rapid advance of tech, this concerns me. That said, currently government funds about 1/2 of science research, and much of the current rapid advance in tech does come from this. I'm not saying a government dollar spent on science is the worst possible use of a government dollar. I am saying government should get out of the way, while market driven and open source methods take over the function of driving science and technology.
I did agree with your points 1 and 3.
It is so Finnish!
It just took them a while to edit out Wil Wheaton's scenes.
+1 stupid.
Free-flowing beer, live music, karaoke and arcade games kept the party raging at the Googleplex the other night, It's about free-as-in-beer, man.
Is it your position that every police officer must always ticket every person they see exceeding the speed limit or safely rolling through a stop sign instead of coming to a complete and utter stop?
Do you have a shred of authority backing up your position?
I would cite to castle rock, _ U.S_ (2005) for the proposition that police have wide discretion not to arrest people.
Laws would be written very differently if legislatures believed that police were robocops with no ability to engage common sense.
Increase revenues while reducing expenses without losing quality. Ok, that's a tautology, I'll be more specific. Plan to fire somebody. Are your staff stakeholders/best friends/family, or just employees? If employees, use the site to find them a better job, while outsourcing their work to india/russia/college interns.
Alternative model, use your employees as temps; hire them out for tech writing contracts that cover their pay.
Revenue models: you are selling google ads and tshirts and classifieds and have a donation button. That model works well for sites with a high hip factor, boingboing.net or penny arcade. It might still work for you with some retooling. But let's look past that.
Maybe your site could broker consulting gigs for a percentage.
The most proven online revenue model is porn. You wouldn't want that on your front page, but maybe a link to a page of affiliate sites.
My next comment might be controversial: Amway.
Some kind of network marketing to turn eyeballs into dollars. becoming a thinkgeek affilate is the same sort of thing. i don't know if o'reilly has affilates in the way that amazon does. But amway pioneered the viral marketing model and might be worth looking closely at. Not as a pyramid scheme, but as a coop where each new member sponsors one and only one new member, until the group has buying power to get wholesale discounts. Which means about 200 active people, 0.1% of your monthly hits. Let a network like that build for a year, then start taking a 1% commission on sales.
pretty soon you'd be competitive with walmart. Given that amway does a few billions in sales per year, and you'd be offering their stuff at a lower price than anyone else, it might have some potential as a revenue stream. I've used Amway as an example of a network marketing company with a full product line, but feel free to substitute some other if you find one that's better.
The general idea is to find some way to build win-win relationships that turn your readers into partners, without a lot of complicated new overhead on your end.
Ok, let the flaming begin.
You are mistaken. police officers have wide discretion to not make arrests, especially where as here it seems likely no crime has occurred, or at least the crime they were charged with did not occur.