Keeping Ideas Alive

-With all of the fines, taxes, and governmental regulation going to today it is almost necessary to wonder if the entrepreneurial mindset will continue to exist. I've been pondering this question for quite sometime, and today my doubts have subsided because of this. "The Million-Dollar Homepage" was created by Alex Tew, a 21 year-old entrepreneur who needed money to finish his degree. So he sold advertising space on a microscopic scale. A lot of it. At $1 a pixel, and a minimum purchase of 100 pixels, one may think that the different websites may be too small to see, etc. This is not only proven wrong by the fact that he made over $1,000,000 because of his idea for the website, but by the testimonials given by the companies that chose to advertise under this new, unorthodox method:

"Our hits have quadrupled, and our sales have gone through the roof. We only bought pixel space for a bit of fun, but now it's as though we're a part of Internet history. Where were you when the million dollar homepage launched? We'd like to congratulate Alex and his team and say thank you for helping our business grow"

-Will Marston, Managing Director, Lollipop Animation, UK

"We first came across Million Dollar when Alex had just 7 people advertising on his site (7th September). We could see that the idea was going to capture the imagination and explode, so we went for it and bought 300 pixels in what was (at the time) prime location at the top left of the page. We were all alone up there. Overnight we saw an 1800% increase of hits to our site and a total of 1200% for the month of September. We were simply happy to support a student that has that kind of imagination to come up with a brilliant idea - we are even happier with the results we received from our $300 investment. To this day The Million Dollar Homepage still remains our largest referrer helping with a 500% increase in hits for October, so it’s still working."

-Greg, The Date Exchange

-I'm glad to see that finally someone is putting their ideas to good use; hopefully ideas such as The Million-Dollar Homepage will start popping out of the brains of innovators everywhere.

Thinking Out Loud About Iraq

-While I don't agree that Iraq was the first place we should have gone to fight terrorism, I do know that they were further down the list somewhere; the United States was going to have to deal with Saddam eventually. The part that aggreviates me is that the leftist media still has to lie about small, irrelevant issues, just to chip away even more at the current presidential administration. These include such instances as Dan Rather's blatant lie about President Bush's military service, the riots over the flushing of the Koran which didn't happen afterall but still resulted in 15 deaths and dozens of injuries, and the recent doctored photos; when will it stop? Why do liberals keep doing this? At this point in the game they should just ride the wave home; they already have enough Bush hating bandwagon supporters to probably succeed in 2008 without lifting another finger. That's the scariest aspect of this whole ordeal; the diametrical mindset that Americans may get from disliking Bush. The "logic" behind this way of thinking is that "Well since Bush did such a shitty job, the only way to rectify his mistakes and shortcomings is to put the candidate that is the exact opposite of him into office." This is the most disturbing part of all: Hillary Clinton being thrown into the presidential running because of how convenient it is to join the bandwagon and disapprove of anything that President Bush says or does.

-While we're on the topic of Iraq, I was having a conversation about the Iraqi war with who - I thought at the time - was at least semi-intelligent. I was proven incorrect. The basis of her opposition on the war in Iraq was that the "people" are against it. This has many faults. One being that it is an argument founded out of the ad populum fallacy, being that just because 51% of the population (or group) believes in something, in turn, proves its truthfulness, or in this case, "proves" the invalidity of the war. This can be summed up in a quote by Johann von Schiller quote, where he said that "The voice of the majority is no proof of justice." Another fact that needs to be stressed is that the "people" do not know what they want. The "people" have a very long track record of making very poor decisions in the political arena. Keep in mind that the "people" voted themselves into nazism, which led to the systematic extermination of over 10 million people; not to mention the hyper-inflation period in Weimar Germany where it took close to a trillion dollars to buy one load of bread. These are just a few of the infinite reasons why America is a democratic republic; because democratically if the "people" were put in charge of everything, we'd end up as the mirror images of such abysmal failures that haven't been seen since the likes of East Germany and Stalin's USSR.

-Another contradictory point that liberals (I'm in college so I have to deal with them on a constant basis) try to press is that instead of fighting in Iraq, we should be freeing the innocent people in Darfur. With this statement alone it can be said that the people who advocate this action plan for America obviously value the people of Darfur more so than the Kurds, which were oppressed by Saddam on, possibly, an even more severe level than the people of Darfur. Are the Kurds worth less than the "Darfurians"? Another question that I will dare any liberal to answer, is this: "If the Iraqi war was for oil, why is the price of gas higher than it was three years ago when the war first began?"

Way To Kick It Off...

Few problems on first day - News

-Before I start to rant, please forgive me (and my writing) because I may come off as a little "rusty" from not writing all summer.

-Right before school started, I went out and purchased a parking pass for roughly $140. I thought that would be all that I would have to do. This is not so. Apparently, I payed $140 in hopes of parking. I drove around yesterday for a combined total of 75 minutes. I saw people parking on the grass, followed diligently by a meter-maid. I stopped and asked if I could park on the grass as well without getting a ticket; my question was answered with a condescending "nope". I payed all that money to park, not to wander around recklessly in hopes of findind a spot. The university took my money so easily, but failed to meet their end of the bargain. USF was/is primarily a commuter school, so one - with more than a brain stem - should have predicted such excessive amounts of traffic because each year more and more students pick USF as their university of choice. The most unethical segment of this whole ordeal is that the university knows it doesn't have adequate parking, and they still sell those passes everyday to dozens of students, knowing that a good 20% of those buyers will be getting ticketed for something that was out of their hands. I believe this all starts with the university and how it misuses the funds it recieves. You may yourself asking, "But Daniel, what do you know about how school funds should be distributed?", and I'd say "I'm no accountant. But I do know that when a school wastes money on "studies" such as this , there are more necessary places that funding should have went." Apparently if it falls under the "study" category it must be beneficial no matter what, regardless of what the "study" is about. Spare me.

Gah!

Im having serious internet problems at school, hopefully this will be corrected by the end of the week.

-Daniel