Tag Archive: power
Yesterday at 22:59 GMT, I received this email from no-reply@amazon.com:
Hello,
It has come to our attention that you are framing our Web site with the domain, th8.us. This activity is prohibited by the terms of the Operating Agreement which states that Associates cannot frame any part of the Amazon site within their site(s). You can review the complete terms of the Associates Program Operating Agreement and Participation Requirements by following this link:
http://affiliate-program.amazon.com/gp/associates/agreement
http://affiliate-program.amazon.com/gp/associates/help/operating/participation
As a result of this activity, your Associates account has been closed and payment of advertising fees has been withheld. Any other accounts you may have or may open in the future which are found in violation of the Operating Agreement terms will be closed and advertising fees withheld without notification.
Thank you for your understanding.
Best regards,
Andy - Associates Account Specialist
http://www.amazon.com
Anyway, this puts me in the untenable position of having no revenue to finance my online operations. After being banned from Google AdSense in Nov. 2010, I never received my final owed payment of $566 (because Google always cheats its 1099-contractors out of their final owed payment), nor will I be receiving my final owed payment of $480 from Amazon Associates.
At the peak of my institution of ads on the Th8.us URL shortener, I had it alternate every hour between Google ads and my Amazon affiliate link. I thought it was pretty ingenious:
if(preg_match(”/^[0-9a-zA-Z_-]{1,62}$/”, $i)) {db_connect();
$result = mysql_query(”SELECT url FROM urls WHERE short_url = ‘$i’”)
or die(mysql_error()); if(mysql_num_rows($result) > 0) {
$row = mysql_fetch_row($result);
if(strlen($row['0']) < 80) $durl = $row['0'];
else $durl = substr($row['0'], 0, 77) . ‘…’;
if(date(’g’) == ‘1′ || date(’g’) == ‘3′ || date(’g’) == ‘5′ ||
date(’g’) == ‘7′ || date(’g’) == ‘9′ || date(’g’) == ‘11′)
{$rand = ‘1′; $qe_override = true;} else {$rand = ‘2′; $qe_override = false;}
$frame1 = ‘<frame name=”t” src=”http://thripp.com/ad.php?’ . $row['0'] . ‘” scrolling=”no” border=”0″ ‘
…
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If you have 3 apple pies and 19 people, how should you slice the pies so that each person gets an equal share? Each person should get 3/19 ≈ 0.1579 pies, but if you make each pie into 6 slices, that’s only 18 slices for 19 people. You have to slice each pie into 6 and 1/3 slices, with each slice being equal except the 1/3 being smaller, and then give the three 1/3 slices to the 19th person.
What if you have 1 pie and the Half-Blood Prince from Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince is the only person dining? Then you have 2 pies per person, assuming he’s half a person. In the expression 1/(1/2), move the denominator to the numerator and flip the ex-denominator, making the reciprocal and thereby converting division to multiplication. 1/(1/2) becomes 1*(2/1) which is just 2, because any number without a denominator has a denominator of 1.
Your neighbor lends you $8000 at 3.75% interest compounded annually, with no payments being required for 25 years and the full balance and interest being required to be repaid at that time. What is the payment? $8000*1.0375^25 ≈ $8000*2.5102 = $20,081.34.
What if you want to make a graph of the increasing amount owed on the Cartesian coordinate system where y is the number of years and x is the dollar amount in thousands? Use the equation y = 8*(1.0375^x).
PROBLEM: Your truck gets 15 miles per gallon in the city and 19 mpg on the highway. Your destination is 38 miles away as the crow flies, 42 miles away through the cities, and 49 miles away if you take Interstate-95. However, taking the interstate requires 5 miles of city driving. How many gallons of gas will be used on each route, which one uses the least gas, and how …
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Since the human mind has limits and time is the eternal constraint, the use of situational ethics can easily degenerate into a moral quagmire that binds you into modes of thought that subtly or severely limit your potential. Conversely, they can splinter your personality into fragments that destroy your cohesive identity.
One solution is to use the same ethics for all situations. This solution is ideal in theory, but leaves you vulnerable to people or situations that conflict with a belief in absolute ethics. For example, if you believe guns are bad, you make yourself vulnerable to criminals with guns who don’t care about your beliefs. If your family is starving to death and you can’t grow or buy food, then stealing from rich people who have too much food (à la Robin Hood) might be a better solution than just giving up and dying. Similarly, if you meet your soul-mate while in a bad marriage, the best choice for your happiness may be a divorce or an open marriage. Absolute ethics may work on paper, but not in real life, because people and situations change. If you live 80 years, that’s only 22,645 days as an adult, so it’s important to make every day count. However, it’s good to have firm guidelines that you only violate in extreme situations.
Another solution is to use ethics that maximize your personal happiness. Doing this in the short term could involve eating lots of chocolate and ice cream, but for true happiness, you should eat a balanced diet that’s good for your body, mind, and spirit. Doing this is not delaying happiness, but extending it over a long range of time and variety of mental states. If you maximize your personal happiness, you might take advantage of other people, but then when that stops …
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This is a list of conspiracy theories for 2011, that you can feel free to refer to when you need a fresh perspective on your life.
I am writing these not based on what I see in the mass media, but what I see in my own mind, elitist writings, and what people are hinting at like Ron Paul, Alex Jones, Charlie Sheen, Andrew Nepolitano, John Mica, and to a lesser extent, Glenn Beck.
Procrastination
Procrastination can be due to laziness, but more likely it’s because what you’re procrastinating on is stupid and boring. The answer may be to trudge through school, college, work, family life, or whatever you need to do, or it may be a full paradigm shift, i.e. a cross-country road-trip in your car, reading or writing a good book, or disappearing for a while.
The important thing is to maintain liberty throughout your life, and the way to do that is to live below your means, have plenty of income, live in a nice house in a safe neighborhood, own a few good cars, eat healthful foods, have dogs to guard your house, and be married with children to take care of you when you get old.
Almost anything that you are procrastinating on is non-essential. No one is capable of procrastinating on ingesting foods and fluids forever, so if you worry you are procrastinating, you are still eating (hopefully), so you have nothing to worry about.
Infinity
The opposite of infinity is zero, and both infinity and zero exist only in the imaginary number plane, not in the real plane, except when expressed as concepts rather than constants.
Nothing in life is infinite, but our minds are infinite for practical purposes, excluding those attacked by fluoride, chlorine, genetic defects, cancer (prevented/cured by amygdalin), environmental problems, or psychological limits. However, we should not assume …
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A curious property of CPU architecture is the argument that datasets should be big-endian or little-endian, that is, should the most significant items be listed first, saving the least for last, or should the least significant items be listed first, saving the best for last? What if the transmission of data is cut-off mid-stream? The computer program may be tempted to accept the big-endian dataset because it contains the most significant data, but “the devil is in the details” as they say, so this could be a fatal mistake. Similarly, the computer program may be tempted to drop the little-endian dataset entirely because it contains no significant data, but the unrevealed data at the end may have led to a different conclusion.
For the purposes of computer science, it is tempting to say that endianness is a solved problem and Intel won. However, just because Intel is the largest manufacturer of computer processors and Intel’s X86 and X64 processing architectures are little-endian does not mean that is the best way to go. It’s very possible we could have much further advanced computers now if not for Intel’s choice, or much crappier ones. It’s also possible we could have big-endian computers that are just as advanced as the current ones, and it’s possible those computers would be just as advanced despite Intel, or with Intel’s help, i.e. because big-endian is very superior but Intel’s engineers persevered anyway on the hard road, or because big-endian is very inferior and Intel’s engineers took the easy road, never reaching the full potential of human discernment.
It’s also possible that neither path is correct, both are equal, or some are more equal than others, to quote Planet of the Apes. It’s also possible that different endiannesses are appropriate for different situations, i.e. big-endianness for lossy editing and …
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Nobody knows the time or the hour that Jesus will return to Earth, or even what form he will choose. It could be 4000 years from now, a million years from now, or it could be that he never even left. It could be that it’s incumbent upon us to change the world and change ourselves to prepare for his arrival. But one thing’s for sure — destroying the world will not get Jesus to return. Only embracing it will, but not in a physical way — in a mental way, for even a man who has looked upon a woman with lust has committed adultery in his heart.
I grew up not believing in any particular religion, but now I see that religion fulfills a critical need in peoples life — the belief in something permanent and unchanging outside themselves in an impermanent and changing physical world. Trying to tear down religion might be the right step at the level of fear, and ignoring religion might be the right step at the level of hope, but only embracing it is the right step at the level of love, tolerating it at the level of perfection, and loving it at the level of imperfection. As in the words of Data from Star Trek: The Next Generation, “to love him was to know him, and to know him was to love him.”
Therefore, it’s very important to first embrace religion, then reject it, and then recapitulate. Most people only go through this process once or twice in their lives, and if they go through it more than that they feel like a failure, when in fact they are much more successful at their human mission than people who never change mental states.
If you go through this process process too frequently, you might have …
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An Analysis of the Culture of India
Richard X. Thripp
Daytona State College
For Dr. Natalie D. Rooney
EDF 2085 Introduction to Diversity for Educators
Culture Paper, 15%
Sunday, 2011 February 6
Final First Draft
Abstract
The culture of India is very unique and goes back thousands of years. In this essay, I will focus only on modern India, particularly on Mohandus K. Gandhi’s influence on the formation of the 20th century Indian government and culture, but also on religion and language. However, I will be ignoring movies, music, and postsecondary education.
Additionally, I will list major American institutions, advice for Indian American parents and children immigrating to the United States, academic citations, and personal commentary.
Finally, I will include a lot of relevant metrics, subjective summarizations, and statistics.
Note: I did not use proper A.P.A. style or proper citations in this paper.
India has both a rich cultural history spanning multiple millenniums, and is the 2nd most populated country on earth with a population of 1,155 million (C1), trailing China’s population of 1,331 million but leading the 3rd most populated country on earth by a whopping 275% — the United States, which has 308 million people. (All statistics as of 2009.)
However, many people in India are very poor and under-nourished, lacking proper food, water, shelter, infrastructure, education,
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A triangle drawn with an ultraviolet laser pointer with an 8″ exposure on a tripod. It was hard to get the sides right, but I think laser pointers are a lot of fun for photos.
This was on the night of the lunar eclipse, 2010-12-21. I was getting bored waiting for the eclipse to reach totality so I did this.
Canon Rebel XTi, EF 50mm 1:1.4, 8/1, F2.5, 50mm, ISO1600, 2010-12-21T02:07:35-05, 20101221-070735rxt
Download the high-res JPEG (3.58MB) or download the source image (9.38MB).
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 License. Credit me as Richard X. Thripp and link here.
Basically, if you have a website with your name in the URL, you are not living a low-profile life. I should probably change my website from richardxthripp.thripp.com to something that isn’t my real legal name, but I have no intention of doing so. In this article I would just like to talk about the mindset and benefits of low-profile living.
When I talk about keeping a low profile, I’m not talking about having a fake I.D., not using Google, or shielding yourself from corporations or governments. I mean shielding yourself from ordinary people. I consider it perfectly normal to give out my Google Voice phone number to people I meet at work, college, events, or shopping, but many people restrict their phone number to close friends. While I use a fake last name on Facebook, I only started this recently and still list my real last name as an alternative so people can find me. Most chilling of all, my home address is still listed on all my domain registration records. I really need to get a P.O. box, but I don’t want to pay every year for it, and I don’t want to risk putting a fake address on my domains because that is technically grounds for domain seizure by the ICANN, Verisign, or GoDaddy.
However, many people don’t even share their home address or personal details with close friends or romantic partners. Some people don’t even have phone or email―you have to go to their house or write a letter to get in touch with them. Other people live in the wilderness, such as rural North Carolina, where they are mostly cut off from modern life. I’ve lived a stone’s throw from Daytona Beach all my life, so it’s difficult to imagine being thirty minutes from the nearest Walmart.
Though I …
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When I launched my 20-week Thripp 2010 project on 2010-08-15, I set goals that were way too lofty and I didn’t reach many of them. I did post 80 new photos on this site, 40 on Thripp.com, a few new piano compositions, and 55 comics, but my original goals were much higher. Also, my Alexa rank plummeted from 60K to 90K when I wanted to increase it to 40K. I don’t know why my traffic is declining so much, but I must assume it is because I haven’t been writing any hard-hitting articles. Also, I haven’t released a new version of Tweet This in over 2 months, though I am keeping up with all support requests. Next time, I will set my sights lower.
My three goals were:
1. Get 50,000 absolute unique visitors in total for the three sites (track with Google Analytics).
2. Earn $2000 in Google AdSense revenues (including other sites such as Th8.us).
3. Increase the Alexa ranking of Thripp.com to 40,000.
I met only the first two, and #2 won’t even be confirmed until Google pays me my final payment after having my original account banned for undisclosed policy violations. Fortunately, it wasn’t click fraud, so they let me make a new account, but the $570 Google owes me won’t be paid out until Feb. 10, if at all. Google is very good at holding grudges and cutting off communications. No one will answer my phone calls or emails.
Amazon.com owes me about $720 in affiliate commissions for Nov. and Dec. 2010, but they use a net-60 payment schedule so I won’t be paid for those months until Jan. 30 and Feb. 28, 2011, approximately. Provided the $1290 comes in, I beat $2000 easily, thanks to other advertising and some generous donations.
For #1, Google Analytics reports 77,613 …
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