The public eagerly jumping for the chance to teach corporate bodies how to better advertise to them seems a little preposterous.

Really? Makes perfect sense to me.

You might carry around your Minority Report-inspired retinal-scanning tinfoil hat, worried about the evils that faceless corporations can inflict upon us if they know our buying habits and personal preferences. I'm a bit more pragmatic: they're going to try to make money, and selling me things I want is a pretty good way to do that.

Here's the thing: advertising isn't going away. Yeah, I'd love for the local politicians to get a wild hair and suddenly decide to tear down all the billboards along the highways. But do I think that'll ever happen? MaHellNo.

So instead, why not cooperate with the corporations to at least move advertising to a state where it doesn't make you want to claw your eyes out?

You may not, but I personally love the "You Might Also Like"-type features when done well. I'm a consumer. I buy things. In a world with millions of products, yeah, I could use a bit of help separating the things I might be interested in from the stuff that I won't. Show me something that says "10 of your friends rated this item with 4 stars or better" and I'm going to pay attention.

Movies/films are a great place for this type of work. We've got a history of over 100 years of cinema -- enough that no one has seen everything. Want to help me separate the wheat (Run Lola Run) from the chaff (The International)? Yes, please.

... we see our first CERT advisory for a buffer overflow exploit in Dig Dug, leading to a remote execution vulnerability in your 'net-enabled MAME console.

I tried to start my career in orlando and got nowhere. I found myself competing for low paying salaried jobs against people from colder states with masters degrees who were willing to pay the sunshine tax.

This is a good point that I didn't think about until you brought it up. As Florida is so retiree-heavy, the low- to mid-level tech positions are high-competition and don't pay very well. (This is true of pretty much the entire state, though, not just Orlando.) Why hire a new graduate who thinks they should make $50k on their first day, when you can hire a Navy/Air Force retiree who is living off a pension and will take $40k?

People without a degree run into the same problem. I was one of those people until I went back to UCF and finished my BS.

However, the high-end tech positions do pay well, and aren't nearly as contested. I'm not talking about MS- or PhD-level stuff, more like BS plus 5-10 years experience. And you can't just look good on paper -- you need to have actual skills. You'll start at $65k-$75k and make it into 6-figures quickly. This may not sound like much when compared with Chicago/NYC/LA/SF rates, but remember the lack of state income tax and the cheaper cost of living. You can be self-sufficient on less than $40k here, and be quite comfortable before you hit $50k. At $65k you'd have to be profoundly fiscally irresponsible to have a bad time of life around here.

Did I mention the bugs?

I always forget about the bugs, to be honest. To me, they aren't a big deal. Love bugs are only a problem for a few weeks twice a year. Palmetto bugs (flying cockroaches as big as your thumb) and ants are only a problem if you don't maintain a pest control service like Terminex or Sears. Or, maybe you have cats and don't mind picking up the occasional present.

Another thing visitors always say to me: lizards. I don't really notice them, but they really freak out some people. They are ubiquitous here. But we're talking about little anoles, not the big iguanas they have down in the Miami area.

And the flat -- some people just can't deal with it. Pretty much all of Florida is startlingly flat, especially to people that grew up in New England or out west. All of my NYC/Chicago friends discover how agoraphobic they are when they come down here.

I've worked in IT in the Orlando/Central Florida area since 1996. It's not that bad. It's not some perfect Utopia, but nor is it one of the worst places to work.

The Good

• One of the cheapest costs of living, especially if you don't mind commuting from the burbs.
• No state income tax.
• Hundreds of miles of beaches within 90 minutes in almost every direction.
• More theme parks than you can shake a stick at, most of which offer cheap annual passes to Florida residents. (True story: I used to live across the street from Universal, and would get up at 8am to go ride the roller coasters for an hour before work.)
• Wide variety of cultures and food, so if you've got a craving for it, you can probably find it within a 10 minute drive.
• Winters are beautiful and cool.
• Rails-To-Trails has converted many miles of old railroad tracks into running/cycling trails. My favorite trail is a half-marathon long (13.1 miles) one way, with only 2 lighted intersection crossings.
• The IT program at the local university (UCF) isn't bad, and is very tech-worker-friendly with its online options. Many of the local community colleges even offer certification programs (such as A+, CCNA, Oracle, and even RedHat) in both day and night school.
• Shuttle launches are awesome and you can see them by walking outside. Yeah, they're going away in a few short years, but they're still awesome.

The Bad

• It's a commuter town. Get used to driving everywhere. The public transport (GoLynx.com) is laughably bad, especially for IT workers. (The buses don't run useful schedules near the tech areas such as Heathrow.)
• The nightlife continues to decline, and many local lawmakers continue to nail down the coffin lid.
• Yeah, we occasionally get hurricanes. Sometimes more than one per season. But they aren't nearly as bad as what you see on TV, and we don't panic like other places do. In most cases we shut down the town for 24-48 hours and then go right back to work.
• The blue-hairs. Yes, they really do drive as bad as you've heard. Yes, they do get out and vote for things that will make you cry.

The Ugly

• The heat. Today it is 95F with a heat index of 109F. And it's not a dry heat. It is an oppressive, sticky, walk outside and break into an instant sweat kind of heat.

The tourists aren't that bad, unless you are hanging out in the tourist areas. Which you aren't going to do after your first month here.

In all, there's more good than bad.

Here's the thing: it's not just the path that is the problem, it's also the domain name. You can shorten "/blog/2009/apr/save-the-internet-with-rev-canonical" to "/abc123", but if your domain name is something plus-sized like "rickosborne.org" or worse ... how much have you really gained?

It's a little helpful, but not really. What you've done is remove the little bit of semantic meaning from the link, all in the name of being able to ego surf easier. Huzzah.

Glad you liked it. Now tell all those ACs that it's not nearly as off-topic as they want to think.

the previous poster's point, which you clearly missed, was that people who know a little [..] about computers took one look at the graphics and said "that's not real"

I didn't miss the point, I disagreed with it.

Yeah, the technology may have been real. Yeah, the little pre-teen proto-geek might have somehow been exposed to it. Each link in the chain may have been perfectly plausible.

But when you look at the whole chain from end to end, doesn't it make you roll your eyes at how nigh-impossible it is?

For me, that happened to be one of those times that the suspension of disbelief was just too much. Yes, even amidst the dinosaurs stomping about.

The contemporary example would be Shia Labeouf's character in Transformers suddenly finding himself in control of a MQ-9 Reaper, and saying "hey, it's a Reaper, I know this!". Yeah, the technology may be sound, and yeah he may have read about it in a magazine or had a friendly uncle or something dumb like that ... but really? Really?

Maybe instead you would have preferred I used an even more ridiculous example? Praetorians and Mozart's Ghost?

Here's the thing: I picked that example because Crichton was one of the few authors who took the time to get it right, or close enough, without sacrificing the story. So to have the filmmakers come along and insert a cutesy scene where the girl saves the day in a wildly improbably way, yeah that's an especially egregious misuse in my book.

I think it's a good bet your book sucks.

Probably. It's pretty clear to me that we have wildly different tastes in literature and realism.

Done. Posted in the MOBI and LRF forums.

Of course you're right. I'm not sure why I would have rolled my eyes at a pre-teen walking up to a GUI system running on a workstation, worth more than a car, running an OS that maybe a couple tens of thousands of people in the US had ever seen, and exclaiming "it's a UNIX system".

How silly of me. I forgot they spared no expense.

I'm going to burn some Karma here and pimp myself out a bit.

I'm currently trying to sell a novel, Trust Network: a contemporary techno-thriller about a woman who stumbles upon a group of people doing pretty much exactly the kinds of stuff with botnets that we're talking about here. She has a great idea involving social networks and online trust, which is at odds with what these people want to do. From there it's a fast-paced cat-and-mouse to see who can get the upper hand.

One of the reasons I wrote it was because I got tired of all of the contemporary fiction with computers that made you roll your eyes at how absurd the technology was. You know what I'm talking about: "It's a UNIX system -- I know this!". I wrote it to prove that you could get the technology right without sacrificing the story or making you want to scrape your eyeballs out. In other words, it was written specifically for the Slashdot technorati.

I haven't found an agent yet, but until then I have made the complete book available for anyone to read: you can read it online at Scribd, or download a free PDF or have a print-on-demand copy sent to you from Lulu. The cost of the printed book ($9-$17) from Lulu is 100% publishing cost, with nothing going to me. In the US, you can get it shipped to you for as little as ~$15 total. I've even got a sort of money-back guarantee if you decide it was a complete waste of your money.

If you are intrigued by the thought of what you could do with a million zombie computers at your command, and you enjoy geektastic fiction, then have at it. I hope you enjoy it. Meanwhile, I've got about a zillion query letters to agents that I have to get back to writing.

Yes, MMS is wicked expensive past a certain point. As is SMS. But I'm not talking about using MMS/SMS as a primary means of communication. For my family, MMS and SMS occupy the space between zero communication and 15-20 minute conversations or emails. We don't always need to have full-blown conversations, but the quick notes of SMS and pictures of MMS help us keep in touch.

When someone goes out fishing and catches something nice? MMS. When someone gets the first big snow of the season? MMS. When someone sees a movie and wants to encourage or discourage others? SMS. When someone goes out to a particularly nice restaurant, or maybe to a place that has significance to the family? MMS. Got a question that doesn't need answering immediately? SMS. Just finished a good book? MMS.

We're not talking about a Twitter stream level of traffic here. Maybe a few pictures and texts per week. No one goes over their cell plan's allotment, and if we do the $0.25 per message isn't an issue.

It's a small price to pay for the feeling of cohesiveness we have in a geographically diverse family.

MMS. Actual take-a-picture-and-send-it-to-another-phone MMS. Not this half-assed email attachment crap.

Not everyone in my life wants to check email on their phone, even if they had the capability. But everyone, including my grandmother, texts and uses MMS.

If you enjoy being depressed, you may want to read "The Next Bubble", an article in Harper's by Eric Janszen from February 2008. He predicted this green bubble over a year ago, and it's a pretty grim prediction:

Supporting this alternative-energy bubble will be a boom in infrastructure--transportation and communications systems, water, and power. (...) Of course, alternative energy and the improvement of our infrastructure are both necessary for our national well-being; and therein lies the danger: hyperinflations, in the long run, are always destructive.

Sound something like recent legislation? Then comes the bad news:

The next bubble must be large enough to recover the losses from the housing bubble collapse. How bad will it be? Some rough calculations: the gross market value of all enterprises needed to develop hydroelectric power, geothermal energy, nuclear energy, wind farms, solar power, and hydrogen-powered fuel-cell technology--and the infrastructure to support it--is somewhere between $2 trillion and $4 trillion; assuming the bubble can get started, the hyperinflated fictitious value could add another $12 trillion. In a hyperinflation, infrastructure upgrades will accelerate, with plenty of opportunity for big government contractors fleeing the declining market in Iraq. Thus, we can expect to see the creation of another $8 trillion in fictitious value, which gives us an estimate of $20 trillion in speculative wealth, money that inevitably will be employed to increase share prices rather than to deliver "energy security." When the bubble finally bursts, we will be left to mop up after yet another devastated industry. FIRE, meanwhile, will already be engineering its next opportunity. Given the current state of our economy, the only thing worse than a new bubble would be its absence.

Yes, you should read the whole article. It'll take some time, but you'll come away with a better understanding of how our global economy works these days.

ObCredit: I found this article via Memestreams.

Any zookeeper who has ever worked primates would tell you that this is pretty typical.

My wife worked as a keeper at a prominent chimp and orangutan sanctuary for several years. She would come home with tales that would make your skin crawl of how smart the apes (both chimps and orangutans) are. It turns out that the OUs (you don't say "orangs", as it offends some of the more hard-core keepers) are the more cunning of the two -- she likened them to engineers.

Some examples:

• An orangutan who kept a bit of metal in between his bottom lip and teeth, using it to try to pick the locks at night when the keepers weren't around. After they finally caught him doing it, they went back and reviewed the tapes and saw that he'd been at it for weeks.
• An orangutan who threw her baby onto the hotwire (electrified fence) to use as an insulating glove to get herself over it.
• An orangutan who used a sweater in the same hotwire-insulating capacity. (OUs love sweaters, shirts, and dresses.)
• Chimpanzees that would hear people approaching, then position themselves just close enough to the walkway to be able to urinate and/or masturbate onto the guests (generally not the keepers).
• An orangutan who used a hard plastic toy to chip away at the concrete substrate (foundation) of his enclosure for days, until he finally managed to get to the bare rebar beneath.

Did you know that the apes you see in TV ads (such as CareerBuilder) and films (such as Dunston Checks In) are never more than 3 or 4 years old, but have a lifespan only a little shorter than humans? They're only "cute" when they are very young, and quickly become uncontrollable, no matter how well-trained they are -- precisely because they have that kind of intelligence. (Roughly that of a 4- to 6-year-old child.)

After that, they are retired and put in cages (rarely zoos) for the rest of their lives. The entertainers wash their hands of them, then your tax dollars are spent to maintain them for the next 40+ years. Depending on the facility, this can be as much as $20,000USD per ape per year.

So every time you see a "funny monkey video", think about how much of your paycheck is going to support that ape in a few years.

Why assume that the buyers are women? That sounds rather contrary to the higher proportions of men both in the tech industry and with technophile tendencies.

Let's be honest.

I'd be willing to bet that there are plenty of men buying ebook erotica -- mentally justifying it as "research material".

If you're a socially-awkward male geek, is it really that far of a leap to want to be ahead of the curve when you finally get a woman to talk to you? Yeah, book-learnin' will only get you so far, but it's still better than nothing and a heckuva lot easier to hide than mags or DVDs.