Category Archives: Random stuff

Target sells memory card with nudie pix…buyer traumatized for life – Engadget

Make sure you format your memory cards before you return them… 😆

Target sells memory card with nudie pix…buyer traumatized for life – Engadget

Aleta Kelley of Tucson was, quote “shocked I mean absolutely shocked, there is no other word” to find nearly 80 nude and graphic photos of a middle-aged woman on her supposedly new memory card she purchased at Target.

Technorati Tags:

Ethical Atheist’s Ten Commandments (Or Suggestions)

Found this on Reddit…

Ethical Atheist’s Ten Commandments

1. Thou SHALT NOT believe all thee art told.
2. Thou SHALT constantly seeketh knowledge and truth.
3. Thou SHALT educate thy fellow man in the Laws of Science.
4. Thou SHALT NOT forget the atrocities committed in the name of god.
5. Thou SHALT leaveth valuable contributions for future generations.
6. Thou SHALT liveth in peace with thy fellow man.
7. Thou SHALT liveth this one life thy have to its fullest.
8. Thou SHALT follow a Personal Code of Ethics.
9. Thou SHALT maintain a strict separation between Church and State.
10. Thou SHALT support ye who follow these commandments.

Amazon PR

Amazon.com–News Release

Amazon.com’s hot holiday sellers (Nov. 25 through Dec. 22 based on units ordered)…

— iPods ruled the holiday season in Electronics, owning the top three slots- the Apple 3 GB iPod Nano (Black), the Apple 30 GB iPod with Video Playback (Black), and the Apple 512 MB iPod Shuffle were the top sellers

3GB Nano? They should’ve proof-read thier press releases…

Paul Graham: How to Make Wealth

Subscribed to Paul Graham‘s RSS feed for a while and I think this might’ve been the first new article. A must-read for you guys who read my blog regularly. Having worked at three startups (or relatively small high-tech companies), I agree with a lot of things here.

Paul Graham: How to Make Wealth:

If you wanted to get rich, how would you do it? I think your best bet would be to start or join a startup. That’s been a reliable way to get rich for hundreds of years. The word “startup” dates from the 1960s, but what happens in one is very similar to the venture-backed trading voyages of the Middle Ages.Startups usually involve technology, so much so that the phrase “high-tech startup” is almost redundant. A startup is a small company that takes on a hard technical problem.

Economically, you can think of a startup as a way to compress your whole working life into a few years. Instead of working at a low intensity for forty years, you work as hard as you possibly can for four. This pays especially well in technology, where you earn a premium for working fast.

A great programmer, on a roll, could create a million dollars worth of wealth in a couple weeks. A mediocre programmer over the same period will generate zero or even negative wealth (e.g. by introducing bugs).

That averaging gets to be a problem. I think the single biggest problem afflicting large companies is the difficulty of assigning a value to each person’s work.

the payoff is only on average proportionate to your productivity. There is, as I said before, a large random multiplier in the success of any company. So in practice the deal is not that you’re 30 times as productive and get paid 30 times as much. It is that you’re 30 times as productive, and get paid between zero and a thousand times as much. If the mean is 30x, the median is probably zero. Most startups tank, and not just the dogfood portals we all heard about during the Internet Bubble. It’s common for a startup to be developing a genuinely good product, take slightly too long to do it, run out of money, and have to shut down.

Luxury | Inconspicuous consumption | Economist.com

Luxury | Inconspicuous consumption | Economist.com:

The number of luxury buyers in the developed world is also being swelled by two other trends. First, consumers are increasingly adopting a ?trading up, trading down? shopping strategy. Many traditional mid-market shoppers are abandoning middle-of-the-range products for a mix of lots of extremely cheap goods and a few genuine luxuries that they would once have thought out of their price league.

But perhaps the true symbol of exalted status in the era of mass luxury is conspicuous non-consumption. This is not just the growing tendency of the very rich to dress scruffily and drive beaten-up cars, as described by David Brooks in ?Bobos in Paradise?. It is showing that you have more money than you know how to spend. So, for example, philanthropy is increasingly fashionable…

Technorati Tags: ,