Spoiler: you're not going to like any of it. At all.

I work for a very successful, young company which is run by a very young CEO. On average, I have no meetings at all. We're currently in a huge crunch right now, which means I have 3-minute check-ins at the beginning and the end of the day.

Long meetings have been the butt of jokes for as long as I can remember, and for good reason: they're a giant waste of time, especially for technical people.

This looks very much like one of those articles people will be mocking in 10 years. This really makes Forbes look like they're clinging to the 20th century...how embarrassing.

So leak it first, wait for it to show up somewhere, and *then* contact the vendor and point to the leaked exploit.

Maybe I'm just cynical, having been blown off many times in the past. Generally speaking, the only way to get technical attention is to make non-technical people freak out.

Leak a working exploit anonymously. If a vendor isn't concerned with the security of their users, let them pay the price.

I am Jack's complete lack of surprise.

Better hope /b doesn't get a list of those interns. It would be really awful if someone were to leak a list of the chosen interns, post it to 4chan, and then have them torture and harass them until they curl up in the fetal position, crying.

Sorry, that should read:

We weren't excited by some faux controversy that some no-name newspaper had deleted his article. Speaking for myself and the friends I talked with, we were just mocking De Icaza for being five years behind the entire rest of the world in realizing that dragging a patent-encumbered CLR into Linux just to get some sticky notes on his desktop was a bad idea.

That's a little bit of hyperbole, but the point remains: this guy has been smoking the good stuff.

Yes, yes, preview first, etc etc.

We weren't excited by some faux controversy that some no-name newspaper had deleted his article. Speaking for myself and the friends I talked with, we were just mocking De Icaza for being five years behind the entire rest of the world in realizing that dragging a patent-encumbered CLR into Linux just to get some sticky notes on his desktop.

That's a little bit of hyperbole, but the point remains: this guy has been smoking the good stuff.

Given that our government has basically been up to no good for the last 10 years (and arguably last 40), I would be completely willing to sacrifice our "victory" in Iraq in exchange for citizen oversight.

I can't think of a single military action undertaken during the Bush tenure that benefits me as an American citizen, whereas nearly all of the "secrets" that have been coming out have been directly harming me (conspiracy to fabricate Iraq WMD evidence, ACTA, Guantanamo).

In short, I don't believe these people have my best interest in mind; most of this "secrecy" is just them trying to prevent me from finding out the ways they've been fucking innocent people over. I'm not one of these people who thinks the moon landings were faked or anything, but I think it's blind trust in the government that's naive, NOT skepticism.

Would you prefer that the torture at Guantanamo had been kept secret?

That's funny, you'd expect a lot of them would be using that really popular windows mobile phone, you know, the....err....wait, don't tell me...hmmm

I'd take a look at some of the projects at Metacarta labs (http://labs.metacarta.com/). I worked there for a couple years, and they do a lot with converting old maps into digital, interactive versions. If you get in touch with them, they have some super-enthusiastic people who can give you great advice.

My point is that if companies in general get fewer purchases per impression that's going to devalue an impression accordingly. If tomorrow the number of impressions doubled on all advertisements without a corresponding increase in purchases made, a single impression loses 50% of its value.

I have never deliberately clicked on a banner ad. I certainly have seen banner ads before, so it's impossible to say that they have had NO influence on me, but I can't remember ever seeing an ad for any of the companies that I actually buy things from (gibson, asus, newegg, amazon, etc). Even if I did, for anything other than commodity items with no practical difference between them (deodorant, cola), I would base my decision off of some research, not the contents of a banner ad. Honestly, if you make an ad that is really that good, I'll see it on youtube anyways (e.g. that Old Spice "now I'm on a horse" ad).

One could argue that I would generate impressions for the sites whose ads I view, but I would contribute no click-throughs, thus lowering the click-through rate. You then could reply by saying that I'm obligated to click some of the ads, to which I would respond 1) fuck you, no and 2) then that unless I actually purchase something, I'm just watering down the statistics again.

At the end of the day, advertising is about ROI, and inflating impressions or click-throughs doesn't make a damn bit of difference.

Plenty of companies (Amazon and Newegg) get plenty of my money over the internet, and if you can't figure out how to do that, then I'm comfortable with you going out of business.

Just set up some torrents on the Pirate Bay and let the entire internet do your backup for you!