In August, Steen put himself on eBay to pay for his college education, offering 2 percent of all future earnings to the highest bidder, with a minimum $100,000 bid.
I thought this sounded like a clever financing plan, until I read a couple of paragraphs down:
Not everyone is convinced. eBay removed Steen’s auction after five days [...]
Archive for November, 2006
what a maroon
Posted in Uncategorized on November 30, 2006 | Leave a Comment »
pandora
Posted in free (or not) software, internet, technology on November 28, 2006 | Leave a Comment »
pandora internet radio. Stop reading this and go listen to some new music right now.
Currency for the blind
Posted in economics, politics, technology on November 28, 2006 | Leave a Comment »
I think Judge Robertson must have seen Ray:
U.S. District Judge James Robertson ordered the Treasury Department to come up with ways for the blind to tell bills apart. He said he wouldn’t tell officials how to fix the problem, but he ordered them to begin working on it.
“Of the more than 180 countries that issue [...]
Judge Posner is in the tubes
Posted in free (or not) software, internet, technology on November 28, 2006 | Leave a Comment »
Last week, there was a blurb in the news about a software tool that somone wrote to copy objects in SecondLife, a virtual world currently inhabited by more than 1.6 million avatars. This week, SL announces that they will play host to an interview of one of the most influential US federal judges of [...]
outsourcing captchas
Posted in privacy, technology on November 26, 2006 | Leave a Comment »
The Guardian has a story posted about sophisticated spammers outsourcing captcha problems to naive computer users. This is an unintended consequence of the internet: not only does widespread availability of networked pc’s make distributed computing efforts like SETI and folding@home possible, but it also makes it simple to use bored humans to solve problems that [...]
It was Fyodor who said
Posted in Uncategorized on November 20, 2006 | Leave a Comment »
The degree of civilization in a society
can be judged by entering its prisons.
– F. Dostoyevski, The House of the Dead
I can’t help but wonder what the old boy would think about the progress towards civilization that our society has been making.
checking the numbers
Posted in politics on November 18, 2006 | 1 Comment »
I made a prediction before the elections. I was off by a couple on each scorecard. I can only admit that I’m still too generous by far when estimating the intelligence of my fellow Americans. However, there are folks who suggest that this election was rigged in essentially the same way as the 2004 election, [...]
