conquering the world one oxymoron at a time
March 2, 2007 at 12:33 pm
· Filed under the internet
Have you heard about this webpage? I only just did last night hanging out with some geeky electrical engineers. We were at a popular bar, yet we were talking about the resistors and web scripts and the Million Dollar Homepage. The basic premise is that a 21-year-old kid got a webpage, divided it up into a million pixels and started selling pixels for $1 a piece. Well, the pixels sold out, and he made a million dollars.
Another example someone gave last night of people making ridiculous money off the internet was that of someone who got the domain name “netflicks.com” (as opposed to netflix.com for the actual video rental service). NetFlix has a referral program where you get money for each person you refer to netflix.com, and all the guy did was to set up a link on netflicks.com pointing to the real page. He made thousands before NetFlix finally shut him down.
My inner gut reaction is that this is so cheap. It all seems rather sneakish and backhanded. Right? Right? Then I thought, hey, those are pretty clever ideas. If someone came up with that idea, they ought to be able to make money off of it. How is it any different from someone making money off of a patent? I wish I had an idea.
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Patents usually are for inventions that generally improve the condition of human life as opposed to generating wealth from a gimmick. :-)
I’m sure if people as smart as you and I decided wealth was all that mattered, we could develop a string of ridiculous ideas until one finally stuck and we made money. But it might take a few years…5? 10? And how much has been invested in our education to date that we may be smart enough to contribute more than a gimmick back to society? Really, have you ever priced what your brain is worth? It’s at least six figures, I mean counting the cost to exist and to learn starting in preschool up until now.
What if Schrodinger hadn’t discovered his wave equation? What if Madame Curie hadn’t sacrificed her life in the study of radioactivity? All of our CAT scanners and cell phones and computers would not have been. And what does all that technology contribute to GDP? How many billions? Can we price the contribution of an educated mind to society..?
You asked. :-)
(And I’d rather drop a dollar in the Salvation Army bucket than buy a pixel. :-p)
Liang wrote @ March 5th, 2007 at 9:46 am
Now that you mention it, Schrodinger discovered his wave equation while on holidays with an unidentified lover: “A successful merger of sex and science was engineered by Erwin Schrodinger, the Austrian quantum physicist, who gave us the parable of the cat that is both alive and dead. In 1925 Schrodinger invited a still-mysterious woman friend to join him over the year-end holidays in a lodge in Arosa, Switzerland. While he was there he invented a wave equation that won him the Nobel Prize. It now bears his name and has been the basis of quantum mechanics ever since.
At Oxford, where he fled the Nazis, Schrodinger lived openly in a threesome with his wife and a mistress (the wife of his assistant), who bore him a daughter in 1934…” (NY Times, 13 February, ‘Crossed by the Stars they Reached For”, by Dennis Overbye)
Oh dear. Well, he still went through an awful lot of education and hard work before his apparently legendary holiday fling (quantum physics didn’t just pop out of grade school algebra). Thank you for the amusing tale, but I think the only conclusion we can draw from your story is that sex helps a person think. :-)
Must be why I can’t concentrate these days… :-O
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