A: $140?! At near-zero bandwidth, unless storage is large (i.e., you're storing 10+ gigs of data on the site for public access), find a cheaper provider. Asmallorange's lowest plan is a few bucks per month. Amazon's cloud stuff may be almost free, too, based on a hit/day metric.
B: I'd presume FIL is writing off the expense, so real after-tax cost is down roughly a third from there. $30 bucks becomes $20.
C: With domain registration, you'll still end up having some cost. Back up to $30.
D: If all you get is a hit a day, focus on correct info on various high-scoring results: (yourstate) (your name) (your specialty). Don't obsess, but think about it occasionally.
E: 9/10ths of local advertising mechanisms that are begging (BEGGING!) for your business will create little web-presence improvements free with any ad purchased. Instead of considering $140 a year expensive (!), do little PR things: clean up or add data for local-hospital / local/state registries / WebMD / yelp / yellow page / local newspaper / chamber of commerce presence. Analyze where clients come from, and do 80/20 effort on the sure stuff and the stuff I just mentioned - The ROI for small psych practices might be negligible, but he WILL pick up clients based on people stumbling across his name in these places, or by recommendations.
F: look at his home broadband contract: running a server from there could get DOS'd by the ISP noticing him, could get a price increase for violation of a 'no hosting' clause, and could just get DOS'd because the ISP doesn't notice him: my self-administered exim server got to be too much of a PITA eventually, with my ISP doing random things to silence rogue spam daemons.

Having said that, I'm also running tiny sites or daemons from a wrt54g, from a few Amahi servers, a Shiva (and have friends doing everyhting from FREESCO to PWNIE to RPi). Rock on. Just recognize that $140 a year isn't a good business motive.

Think I replied to you elsewhere, said you didn't know shit. From here, I can see it ain't that you're ignorant... you've just been burned. My apologies.

I completely get where you're coming from. Any championship starts to get burdened with side values/costs, whether it's olympics or these sorts of academic leagues or even amateur sports. It's the golden rule, in reverse: Money corrupts, more money corrupts things more. Maybe I'm lucky: my kids are so far down the damn well that merely qualifying for state boggled our minds and will expand their horizons immensely. Some of these kids come from entire families that have never set foot on a college campus or seen knowledge work as a career possibility. I don't want them to strive to almost win and then get nuked by the money-centered cheaters club. That'd sting bitterly, and again my condolences -- most of us have this happen occasionally. But that's not the only possible takeaway. I just want my kids to see more career options than their parents saw.

BTW, you're still wrong about FIRST w/r/t FIRST Lego: entirely preprogrammed minibots. The bots may seem lame, but what were you expecting for 5th and 6th grade kids?

An old boy scout leader friend once called himself a ponderosa pine: a big tree, offering shelter and somewhere to lean. As a type-A nerd, it's one of my toughest lessons, to step back and make the kids do all the work. To ask good leading questions, or explain an engineering concept succinctly in a tangent. To keep them from hurting themselves. To praise good hacker insights, or doggedness.

Second year of mentoring a team, same impression. The science/engineering attractive power of this low-budget league amazes me.

Check my prior comment. FIRST Lego is: limited # of sensors/motors, fully autonomous, and designed by kids (5th and 6th graders). Hit the 'net, do some research, and you'll see just how full of s**t your imagined description of the FIRST leagues is.

Better yet, attend a competition (the whole day... listen to the opening/closing ceremonies, sit in on presentations). You'll see they're pushing for engineering prowess MORE than for robotics solutions. As for 'learning something about robotics', even when a system is remotely-controlled, servo feedback and calibration become a big damn deal. When things break, or during co-op rounds, kids have to know what they're doing. These kids learn WHY robotics is tough, and begin to create compensation techniques, even if they don't master robotics enough to do full-autonomy on new hardware on a strange challenge in a few weeks on a few-thousand-dollar budget... or, in my kids' case, on a few-hundred-dollar budget.

Yes, having good sponsors, team members or parents is crucial to some aspects of the competitions. But coming from mentoring a huge team (nobody is turned away) in a disadvantaged neighborhood, I'll personally attest that your post couldn't be more wrong. Or more insulting.

You're reporting what you remembered from your ear to the ground? WTF, doesn't google and wikipedia work where you are?! Did you attend a single FIRST contest? What about the junior or Lego FIRST leagues?

Thanks for admitting you were doing the usual slashdot thing of just spouting off random unsubstantiated b.s., but please... your rant is what is being discussed. You somewhat pwned the conversation with your imagined warrior killer-bot claims.

I'm still reading the thread, but haven't seen mention of FIRST's younger levels yet. And from experience, I can vouch that FIRST Lego are diametrically opposite what you imagine:

The earliest tiers of FIRST are done using Lego. The tier I'm involved in (with a large team of 5th and sixth grade kids) is fully autonomous, involves 'flip switch', 'move object', 'select/gather and return to base' type goals, has a ridiculously-short 3-minute round for nearly a dozen goals (forces prioritiziation), and that part of the competition is sandwiched in with challenges geared toward demonstrating teamwork, public presentation, and learning about and solving some problems geared to some contemporary theme (this year is challenges old people/seniors face, last year was food safety). All of this is wrapped up with a loud, steady mantra of 'graceful professionalism'. I'm mentoring kids in a very-poor neighborhood whose school is working to become a small-city science/tech magnet school (my 2nd year), and was dumbstruck when our team qualified for state (barely; 12th out of 40+ teams in our regional competition).

The senior-high-school FIRST competitors often are judges and support staff for our competitions. This year's emcee was a geeky/charismatic local high-school math-olympics coach. Last year, I saw one of the high-school FIRST team's robots: they had a dozen interesting bits of good-prototyping best practices I never got close to being taught until college: an adjustable chassis (L-channel with holes, like giant erector set parts), deep-cycle batteries and tires and servo-driven motors, a data bus and carefully-built wiring looms for each mechanism, design for field-service/redundancy/spares, onboard and remote diagnostic frameworks, feedback mechanisms, etc. They used an inverted wifi home router (a modded wrt54g or similar) on the robot to talk to their laptop for data/communicatiojn. The chassis was bigger and weighed more than I expected (about 75kg, a meter per side, more than a meter tall). I forget the goal: collect and bin many balls on the playfield, maybe? Gather, scoop, lift, dump, plus motion and detection.

Full disclosure: IANA First representative/spokesperson. For the record, I loved battlebots. My team's kids geek out when they see 'em on youtube. But I can completely see how shifting to combat-competition would drown out or destroy attention on many of the fundamentals being sought here. There's competition in FIRST, because adversarial competition is motivational/educational crack. It's that once you introduce combative sorts of competition, it seems damn hard to not lose ALL of the attention on the other harder-to-teach ideals FIRST is after.

1 - Weapons are a basic human right? So we're guilty of human rights violations by preventing Iran and North Korea from getting nukes? And we should let people buy landmines and grenades? Does this apply to landmines and gas weapons? What about tactical armor and/or rockets and/or nukes? What is the logic that allows each of these distinctions between which is or isn't a human right?
2 - Since when is a rifle a standard weapon of the time now? By quantity, landmines are are almost as plentiful as military rifles (400 million deployed since WWII, 65 million in the last 20 years according to one source 100 million deployed and 100 million in reserves by another). Landmines are definitely cheaper and more cost-effective defensive weapons ($3-30 apiece, remain lethal for decades without attention). By killing efficiency, machine guns win. By force multiplication value and deterence, laser-guided missiles let the afghanis beat USSR. Compared to rocket and grenade launchers, rifles against armor are about as worthless as slingshots.
3 - Tautologies like 'only a government afraid' pretend the entire world is just as you believe it to be. In fact, democratic/republic governments often decide that certain things are unacceptably hazardous. We ban porn, drugs, weapons, religious beliefs, books because the citizens and/or government (they are often the same thing) choose to. This happens less because of fear of citizens than fear of the hazards associated with that item. Yeah, it can be repressive. But that's a shades of grey decision: many very enlightened and safe and progressive nation restricts gun ownership for reasons other than fear.

Reality check: how exactly did this week's small/weak guy improve the pain quotient of the world by resorting to gunfire, vs. the absurd gedankenexperiment of him trying to strangle 26 consecutive people with his bare hands. IOW, your sentence 2 contradicts 3, 4 and 5.

Also: No end is merciful when the alternative was/is not dying in the first damn place.

Interesting theory. But the US already has lax gun laws, yet has more deaths by gun per capita than any other nation.

We can wish for this 'more guns make us safer' claim to be the case, but it just isn't so. Any argument consistently disproved by empirical evidence is just sophistry (that's greek for handwavy bullshit).

Full disclosure: I own several guns. I respect the US 2nd amendment. Where exactly do these disasters involve 'a well-regulated militia'? Where do gun shops selling out this week on AR's and 30-round clips involve a well-regulated militia? I don't see modern-day minutemen. I see fear, paranoia and so many n00bs with guns that there's nonstop mayhem.

Yeah, between GE and IBM, half a dozen colleges, countless telecommuters that figured out how to get the hell out of metro Boston/NYC/etc, and the metro BTV area alone having well over a hundred thousand people, I'd say that your guessing there are ** 5 ** twitter users seems about the douchiest uninformed remark of my day.

Full disclosure: writing this from a conservative flyover state that gets this sort of mocking on a regular basis, not Vermont. Coastal provincialism is a plague -- y'all really don't seem to be aware how snark like that makes you sound like dimwitted, uninformed cretins.

No, that's not really that hard.

A chaotic system works fine; just add the restrictions capability. For example, the programmers/operations engineers involved get told: Foodstuffs can't be next to potential toxins. A flag is added (let's call it FDA1) across the board to all foodstuffs, another to the things they can't be near (FDA2). Then, the chaotic system declares a region of the warehouse FDA1-ok and another FDA2-ok. Takes a split-second more to allocate a new bin, including having built-in 'grow region FDA1-ok' functionality. Buffering distances or anything else just fall into the above decision tree.

Wanna envision this without all the programming? Food on the left rows, pharm on the right. A row for chemicals and cleaners and detergents far from produce. Just like your supermarket. The difference would be that, in a chaotic system, each new case of cheerios to come off the truck could be placed anywhere within the food section where there's space, rather than staff spending hours fronting/rearranging/stocking carefully.

Technically, calling 'ad hominem' is like calling 'godwin'. You're diverting away from $$ and the DDoS happening by a spurious appeal to authority.

I'm hearing similar rumblings for a high end LG fridge. Think we're going to be seeing more of this as time goes by...

I think it's TOAD the line. Origin either from battletoads or Toad The Wet Sprocket's unreleased next album, together with a TARDIS mishap innoculating 18th century culture with the phrase and underlying pop culture context enough to sustain it.

(Yeah, mine may be wrong, but it's not utterly backwards like thinking to toe the line is to challenge authority. Oopsie.)

Fact-checking myself: SEIU has 1.2M healthcare, 1M public sector (mostly government) and a few hundred thousand property mgmt staff. http://www.seiu.org/a/ourunion/fast-facts.php#en