steveitis
Instead of printing new money in this way, we could just give the new money directly to the citizens.
Quick napkin math shows that every person in the US would have gotten a check every year all the way back to the 30's (some years smaller than others), without needing to raise taxes at all. In fact cancelling some of the welfare programs made unnecessary by this system would likely result in lower taxes.
Loans would be more expensive, but more expensive loans seems like a small price to pay for basically ending homelessness and hunger.
What if you were sleeping in someone else's garage, it was less than freezing temperature outside, someone had stolen your car a few weeks ago, and you had put your own kneecaps on the line as collateral? What would it be then?
Frankly, I think I'm holding together rather well given my circumstances.
Now I have zero time to build capital before it's leveraged away. FUDGE!
I am righteously pissed off now. I had investors on the hook. now it will all be arbitraged away from me.
It's just like quicksilverscreen when Rupert Murdoch litigated it away (one of the senators who voted for the DMCA was one of the lawyers defending Fox).
I am ANGRY.
HULK SMASH! BAD SCIENTISTS! BAD!
Now every douchenozzle on earth will be onboard the bandwagon, and render it useless.
EVERY TIME I HAVE A GOOD IDEA SOMEONE BEATS ME TO IT! WHARBLEGLARBLE!
That said this article brought a tear to my eye.
I've been doing it my entire life as a hobby, and since a recent Reddit post wherein I expressed my frustration at being listened to for bug reports I've gotten a couple of dialogs with companies started... So I may end up getting to.
Current job == Unemployed. I hate it. All I do all day is either look for work (of any kind that pays well enough to cover my child support) , or get frustrated and drink.
This makes things slower for the rest of us. 1 extra millisecond per user * 8 billion users * times 10 logins a day == Lots Of Lost Man Hours, probably enough to rebuild the great pyramids of Egypt by hand every year.
Security researchers are the reason we can't have nice things. :)
Let me restate it more precisely: The fact that my needs are not being met is their fault. The fact that I have those needs is mine.
My use case, and those of many others, requires the ability to 'follow' others and still filter their 'useful' postings from their 'non-useful' postings. This is 'my fault', in that I require more from the service than they are either willing or able to provide at this time.
Twitter has reduced my ability to use the service, in the way that I would most like to, by limiting their API and preventing screen scrapers from functioning in a legal and non-harmful way. None of this is any way my fault.
I still think my original phrasing was more concise, if not as explicit.
They could stop allowing that sort of behavior, but they know that a large part of their user-base consists of 'self marketers' and other less subtle spam.
Why can't I sort or filter any of my incoming tweets in any meaningful way? I can have favorites. I can make lists. I CAN'T just type in 'Fck', and stop my feed from showing me the tweets with the word 'Fck' in them.
I can search for tweets about 'Ruby On Rails', but I can't just add those people to a list called 'Ruby On Rails' without clicking each one of them... Several times.
To top it off their API is so limited that just retrieving a list of the people I'm following means I get blocked for an hour before I can do anything with it, and bypassing their silly API is against the TOS. So writing my own tool to filter properly is straight out.
I wanted to write a simple naive Bayesian filter app to separate the wheat from the chaff for me, but they make it damned near impossible to do so without being sued.
If they don't put a stop to the spammers, and build some better tools to filter users they're gonna get MySpaced in a big way.
EDIT This stunning bit of prose just came across my feed: "LOL NIGGAS IS SO FUNNY .... FUCK IT !"
I don't want to see this, anymore than they want to see me talk about agile software development.
All it takes is content. Serious, good, content. Constantly.
QuickSilverScreen.com. It was top 100 (according to Alexa) for a month or so before I gave it away to a Swedish dude named Neels.
More people watched Lost on my website than on TV one week. I was proud.
http://www.reddit.com/r/reddit.com/comments/9cvvp/why_it_was...
Now it's because everyone at Google sucks, and this is some unforgivable sin on the content providers behalf, not the jerk users who are exploiting it.
Fine internet. Have it both ways.... Sigh.
Anyhow, HIPAA only covers personally identifiable patient information so I think they'd be cool as long as it couldn't be traced back to the original person.
Although theoretically the DNA itself could be considered personally identifiable. I guess it'd be up to the courts to decide really.
No idea what I'd do with it, but I'd find something to reference it against.
Things like 'Condom sales rise, when house is a rerun.'
For people like us who need these things, but don't want to do it alone their should be a sort of Wikipedia/Digg like distributed lexical database.
Everyone contributes data as it's acquired, and it is then verified by the users with a simple up/down vote for each child node.
The data could even be automatically acquired, and just manually verified as it is utilized.
Still an overwhelming task, but I think it would be worth it given all the fields that overlap with Natural Language Processing these days.
Then average all of the samples together, shotgun the results (ala shotgun sequencing), and produce an overall average model of the relative capacitance between all the neurons in the human brain.
I'm sure it's a hopelessly naive idea, but man would it be cool to emulate an entire human brain, even if it was in 1/1000 or 1/100000 time.
I don't particularly care about the license, but I'd rather not have to build my own spider to crawl and generate one for me.
If so than you have a viable business model. If not, than stick to your current 'sell it to them' plan.
Give away, and ad support, things that everyone needs or wants. Charge for niche content. It's the way of the internet, currently.
Really though more info is necessary. For instance if it's a certain type of SaaS you may be able to make a living on paid support without either option, or if it's a cool webapp than perhaps a freemium model should be embraced.
The difference pointed out by the study is that the memory of the steak is likely to make you happier in the long run than owning the hot tub even though the steak is long gone and the hot tub is still there. After all, the hot tub will eventually become a chore (repairs, cleaning, upgrades, etc...) but the memory of that steak never really dies if it was extraordinary. It's counterintuitive, but it makes sense to me.
This study is why I've started trying to focus on experiences, rather than things, when buying gifts. So far it's worked out rather well for me.
I mean if the decision were phrased 'Would you rather pay a babysitter, take your SO out for an excellent meal, followed by a night of drunken shenanigans, and finish up making passionate love in a wonderful hot tub suite at a local hotel or would you rather buy an iPad?' than the only people buying an iPad would be the very lonely or those with a direct business interest.
It's just hard to keep that kind of perspective sometimes.
I think that neither really makes them less 'immortal' in the sense that this article means.
Though I can see the argument that errors in cell replication leading to cancerous growths could be counted as a form of natural life span limitation, I would be surprised if it didn't also happen to this jellyfish.