NebuPookins.net - NP-Complete - Why not? Here's why not.

NebuPookins.net

NP-Complete

Deprecated: Function ereg_replace() is deprecated in /home/nebupook/public_html/include.parse.php on line 32

Deprecated: Function ereg_replace() is deprecated in /home/nebupook/public_html/include.parse.php on line 33

Why not? Here's why not.

Tue June 28th, 2005, 5:09 AM EST | 4 comments

I recently discovered this site, "Why Not?" in which people can post their ideas to share and have it get discussed.

Quite frankly, some of these ideas are pretty damn bad. Here's one, the submitter made anonymous to avoid slander/libel:

Why not have your email software download your emails, then - in the background - scan the email for links or submit buttons. If there are links/buttons follow those links/buttons to the page they point to, and scan that page for keywords to determine whether the orginal email is SPAM.

For example, if an "innocent" email arrives which links to a porn-site even though there are no suggestive keywords in the email itself, the system would go to the porn-site and scan it for keywords - then flag the original email as SPAM.

Here's why not: spammers don't know what e-mail addresses are valid and which aren't, so they pretty much just send spam to all possible addresses. This is somewhat time consuming though, so they'll put custom content that's associated with your e-mail address, so that if you click on any links, that means you must have received the e-mail, so the adress must be a valid one. For example, if I were a spammer, and I might send a whole bunch of e-mails with links in the form "http://nebupookins.net/nebu_at_gta.igs.net.html", with that last part changing depending on what e-mail address I'm sending to. If I had sent the spam to foo@bar.com, then the link would read http://nebupookins.net/foo_at_bar.com.html, for example. Then, whenever someone clicks on such a link, it'll show up in my logs, and I can add that address to my list of valid addresses.

Here's another bad one:

It's not often one thinks that there should be another form to fill out with your taxes, but tell me what you think of this: when you file your return you can fill out a form that will allocate your tax money to federal (or even state) budget items you would like to support. Let's say that a percentage of your taxes would go into the general fund to be evenly distributed to everything, but that the rest can go to where you want it to go.

Example: your taxes are $1000 this year. 50% of that goes in the general fund to get distributed to every budget item. The rest can go to as many budget items as you select. So if you want to send more money for HumVee armor you can check Military/Defense and if you want to support the Arts you can check the NEA box. Then $250 of you taxes will go to the military and another $250 will give some artist a grant.

The main benefit of this is giving the taxpayers direct control over what their taxes are being used for. Possible side benefits include less fighting in Congress over the budget as part of it will be pre-determined (unlikely, but anything's possible.)

Why is this a bad idea? Because people are financially stupid. How many people can organize a budget for their own lives? Do you really want these people organizing a budget for the lives of millions of others?

Porn sites come in so many versions that it is hard to know what to click on and what to avoid. I would like to see every porn website be required to have the .sex suffix. If their website address is, say, girls.com, the new address (only accessible if the suffix is attached) would be girls.com.sex.

While this does not "censor" these sites, it does permit parents to easily block pornographic content using their Windows settings, etc. Further, porn sites that tried to end run this requirement would lose access from all major portals, as well as face a fine.

It seems like the people submitting this idea haven't spent a single day thinking about their solutions. The objection to this is so old, it's become a cliche automatic responce: who defines what is porn? Fucking hell, this person says "this does not censor these sites", meaning (s)he understands why people don't like the idea of censorship. "Not liking censorship" usually isn't a concept you just come up with yourself; you probably heard about how people don't like censorship or read about it somewhere (because I think most children will naively, if left to come to their own conclusions, initially believe censorship to be a good thing). So if this person heard or read about censorship somewhere, (s)he must have heard the line "who defines what is porn?". Didn't that line pop into his/her head when she thought of her .sex idea? Apparently not.

Of course, not all the ideas are bad. For example, somebody responded to the .sex idea with (paraphrasing here): "if you just want to have a section of the web that's safe for kids, make a .kid domain, and only allow kids safe stuff in there." Brilliant!

I know we want to encourage the discussion of ideas; I'm for that too. And quite frankly, I don't mind people who put an honest effort at thinking through a solution, only have the solution not be feasible in practice. Those people are great 'cause of their intent and motivation. What bugs me is the people who don't bother putting any thought into their solutions, post it, and waste everyone's time. The people who don't put effort into thinking their ideas through are probably the same type of people who then later congratulate themselves on being so clever and coming up with a solution that was so obvious to them, but which they believe has eluded everyone else since that solution hasn't been implemented yet. If they're too lazy to think about their ideas, they're probably too lazy to go and read the comments other people posted about why their ideas are bad too.

Deprecated: Function ereg_replace() is deprecated in /home/nebupook/public_html/include.parse.php on line 60

Deprecated: Function ereg_replace() is deprecated in /home/nebupook/public_html/include.parse.php on line 61

E-mail this story to a friend.

1. Ringohime said:

Generally speaking, it's not too good idea for unprofessional people to come up with solutions for inconvenience. Like you said, some can come up with good idea, but mostly it's all bullcrap that people come up with.

I have been reading this Japanese version of "solution" website and it's really interesting. The concept is different though. You register in and pay member fee once which is $10 for some limited time period. (I think it's more than 6months and less than a year.) Then you find little complaints you have about your daily life and post them there. Then other members or companies who browse the website read those complaints in the form of short entries such as ”Medicines are so hard to take. Plus, sometimes I don't have water when I wanna take them." If they think this idea could be useful for their business, they vote for the entry. ($5 out of the member fee is used to vote. It costs $1 to vote for one entry, so you can vote 5 times.) Then the submitter of the post get money according to the number of the votes. $1 for one vote. Then the company try to make products which solve the issue. In this case, some pharmaceutical company made various medicines that can be taken without water and works right away. Well this wasn't a very good example... There are a lot more better claims at the website.

It started as just a website, but it got so popular that now they hold "Claim Exhibition" annually, which shows all the popular claims they got in the website and the picture and description of the solution product, if there's any, next to the claim. If there is no solution next to it and if the company wanna work on it, they just take a note and bring it back to work on it.

Once the exhibition is over, they start the new season at the website, people pay the member fee for it, and they repeat the same thing.

People make quite a lot of money with this. Some of the regular consumers make more than a few hundred dollars per one season just by complaining. And of course the companies make big benefits also. I think this is a brilliant website. What do you think?

Posted on Mon June 27th, 2005, 10:30 PM EST acknowledged

2. Nebu Pookins said:

Just to make sure I understand, someone posts a complaint they have about life, and people vote on which complaint is the best one. Then the company comes up with a solution for the complaint. So basically people are coming up with business ideas for the company, and at the same time giving the company $5 (since it cost $10, but only $5 of it can be used for votes, so I guess the company keeps the other $5).

Nice idea, though there doesn't seem much motivation to vote. It seems like it's more worthwhile to form "clubs" and in which all the members vote for each other to increase the chance that they make money.

Posted on Tue June 28th, 2005, 9:49 PM EST acknowledged

3. Ringohime said:

No, people don't choose the best ones. They choose the ones that need to be solved in their opinion also, or if that's a company that's voting, the ones which they think that they can make improvements.

The company who's hosting this website take the half of member fee. Not the companies who browse this website.

It shouldn't be just a club. If you can vote as many times as you want, you wouldn't choose the ones you really think are important. It'll just become a stupid website just like "Why not?".The goal is not to benefit the consumers a lot by paying them. The final goal is to benefit the consumers by making better products. The extra bucks consumers get is just a little reward. What you said is exactly why North American products never get improved. The individuals just think about making huge profits, not about volunteering their idea and benefit the society, and consider the money they get by it as a small reward for it.

Plus, this website will become chaotic without a host like this who has absolute controll over the website.

Posted on Wed June 29th, 2005, 9:12 AM EST acknowledged

4. Nebu Pookins said:

What I meant by a club is let's say me and 999 of my friends (so we're a group of 1000) form a club. We brainstorm ideas, and try to come up with the best 5 ideas. Then we all register accounts (each person pays $10, so the club as a whole spent $10'000) and post these 5 ideas, and we all vote on these ideas, so our 5 ideas immediately get 1000 votes each, so we automatically make back $5000 of the money we paid.

Now presumably this site has a "Hot ideas" or "best ideas" or whatever. Since these ideas all have 1000 votes for them, they'll probably appear in the list of hot ideas. They'll be on the front page and very visible, which means that most people are going to be encouraged to vote for it. Just by peer persuation, they'll see 1000 people already voted for the idea, and they'll want to vote for it too.

Note that the club spent $10'000, and we already made back $5000. We only need 5000 more votes to break even. If the site has 1'000'000 members, only 0.5% of the people need to vote for our ideas for us to break even. Using the generic 80/20 rule, I can assume that 20% of the ideas will get 80% of the votes. As a rough estimate, I'll assume every person has 1 idea, so there's 1'000'000 ideas on the site. 20% of that is 200'000 ideas. Our 5 ideas, already having 1000 votes each, are part of the top 20% ideas.

200'000 ideas get 80% of the votes. There's 1'000'000 members, and each member gets 5 votes, so that's 5'000'000 votes, 80% of which is 4'000'000 votes. Assuming these votes are distributed evenly among the 200'000 ideas, that's 20 votes per idea.

Damn, my plan fails, because 20 votes per idea with 5 ideas from our group means we get 5100 votes (5000 from our own voting, plus 20 * 5 votes from the 80/20 rule). So we actually lose money.

Okay, nevermind.

Posted on Fri July 1st, 2005, 12:18 AM EST acknowledged

You must be logged in to post comments.

Name:
Password:
	Register a new account.